Jofish Kaye is a computer scientist who aligns design, data, and qualitative exploration for human-centered product innovation.
His superb track record as a scholar includes more than 100 publications and affiliations with MIT, Cornell, and Microsoft Research. Surprisingly, his career has been in corporations: following stints at Nokia, Yahoo, and Mozilla, he is now a director of AI and UX at Anthem.
I have been a fan of his work for many years – he is a brilliant research writer whose takes are as entertaining as they are rigorous and instructive. In the longest episode of Design Disciplin to date, we had a massively wide-ranging conversation on pretty much all of our mutual interests: research, philosophy, social sciences, leadership, and more.
Chapters
00:00 What does Jofish mean?
02:00 Being a scientist in design
06:05 Methods for understanding users
10:17 Ethnomethodology
13:04 Epistemology
16:00 On books and papers
18:53 On videos, documents, and slide decks
25:52 Tactical design
28:13 New job as director of UX and AI
33:49 Studying at MIT and Cornell
38:00 Academia vs. corporations, and the HCI research community
43:32 Being a scientist at a corporation
46:49 Productivity, priorities, and balance
58:30 Publishing research at corporations
1:06:27 The meaning of design
1:07:27 Places and tools for work
1:08:33 Life outside work
1:09:44 Closing
From the conversation:
Books
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn — https://link.amazon/B0gXceBdA
Papers
• Firefox Voice: An Open and Extensible Voice Assistant Built Upon the Web by Julia Cambre et al. — https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445409
• The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers by Daniel F. Chambliss — https://academics.hamilton.edu/documents/themundanityofexcellence.pdf
• Undisciplined disciples: everything you always wanted to know about ethnomethodology but were afraid to ask Yoda by Alan F. Blackwell, Mark Blythe, and Jofish Kaye — https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-017-0999-z
Courses and conversations
• Casey Fiesler on TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@professorcasey
• Human-Centered Design: An Introduction by Scott Klemmer — https://www.coursera.org/learn/human-computer-interaction
• Jofish Kaye on Changing Academic Life — https://changingacademiclife.com/blog/2019/2/2/jofish-kaye
People and concepts
• Epistemology — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology
• Ethnomethodology — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnomethodology
• Grounded theory — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grounded_theory
• Harold Garfinkel — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Garfinkel
Research communities
• CHI 2021 — https://chi2021.acm.org
• Cornell Information Science — https://infosci.cornell.edu
• MIT Media Lab — https://www.media.mit.edu
Tools
• Adobe InDesign — https://www.adobe.com/products/indesign.html
• Evernote — https://evernote.com
• Figma — https://figma.com
• Google Slides — https://workspace.google.com/products/slides
• Microsoft PowerPoint — https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/powerpoint
• Notion — https://www.notion.so
• Sketch — https://www.sketch.com
• Slack — https://slack.com
———
https://jofish.com | https://x.com/jofish
