Joey Zeledon ‘Touchy Feely: everyday things that inspire deeper empathy’

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: Throughout his career Joey has designed everything from footwear, electronics to packaged goods, products, medical devices, housewares, foods, services and spaces. Currently a principle at Steelcase, Joey creates meaningful experiences by innovating healthcare spaces and furniture. In the past, he has collaborated with organisations and brands, including American Xpress, Banana Republic, Bayer Healthcare, Gatorade, Google, New Balance, Revlon and many more.

Joey also serves as a creative director for Mothership, a non-profit start-up focused on empathy-based healthcare and he co-founded the smart food lab at smart design which explores the intersection of food design and healthy behaviours.

Joey recently wrote a book called ‘Touchy Feely’ in which he explores emotional ergonomics. Through his illustrations of human interactions with objects and the corresponding emotional responses, Joey puts a truly unique spin on the way we interact with the things around us and how to design for all the touches and all the feels.

Joey and I are going to talk about what inspired the book and what inspires him as a designer. Let’s get touchy feely. Welcome to the show, Joey.

JOEY ZELEDON: Hey.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: I can’t help but want to make, hey! I can’t help but want to make a joke about the name ‘Touchy Feely’.

JOEY ZELEDON: Yeah well I don’t blame you. I think it’s just good timing.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: It’s funny because I don’t know I always thought that the term ‘touchy feely’ was quite well known but I mentioned it to a few people that I work with and they were like ‘I’ve never heard of touchy feely’ before which is interesting.

JOEY ZELEDON: It is because I thought it was a universal phrase but huh! Yeah.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: It’s universal to me.

JOEY ZELEDON: Well there you go. That’s all that matters.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: Well maybe that’s a good starting point for us today, maybe you could tell us a little bit about how you got the name for the book and perhaps how you got into human centred design.

JOEY ZELEDON: Yeah human centred design and inclusive design, you know we as designers that’s kind of been a hot topic for at least a decade or two now. You know everyone claims to be a human centred designer who is a designer by trade and when you really unpack that, you know to design for humans is the opposite of designing for robots, you know. Robots don’t have emotions and feelings yet but humans very much do, right? And I know this is something that’s been practiced for years now. I think we just innately intuitively do it as human designers in designing for our people, other humans. You know we’re full of emotions and feelings no matter what the circumstance or product we’re using or context that we’re living or interaction that we’re having that’s chock full of emotions. And you know I hadn’t really found some kind of packaged together way to approach, how to do that and I think that was really kind of the impetus for me creating this book for myself was coming up with some way to loosely quantify you know how to design for feelings, for emotions because I think we’re so good at quantifying more technical things, functional things, things that have a number around it, right? But emotions, how do you quantify emotions? Jeez I don’t know if this book really does it but it’s an attempt to at least get the conversation going.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: Well that’s the million dollar question, isn’t it; how to quantify emotions? If we could do that we’d all be millionaires. Interestingly enough it brings up the question for me, if not designing for humans then who? Because that’s what we do, when we’re designing we’re designing for people but it seems like other things get in the way sometimes, whether we’re designing for business or for industry or for other things like you know it seems like the human element sometimes gets extracted from that and the way that I like to put it is that you’re not designing for you, you’re designing for other people. So sometimes I think that maybe it’s not so much that we’re not designing for humans but we tend to design for ourselves. Very selfish way of looking at things.

JOEY ZELEDON: Yeah very much so. You’re exactly right. I think in every design project we know to look at whatever we’re trying to design through the three lenses of the why, what and how or user desirability or, I know you don’t like the word ‘user’, it’s human desirability, business viability and technical feasibility. And I think you’re exactly right that the human desirability lens somehow doesn’t always come first or it’s de-prioritised. But to me that’s crazy, think to you and most designers because if you’re hitting on the ‘why’ the human element, the feeling side, like if you don’t have that desirability, what do you have? Who cares if you can make it, who cares, I mean sure you can definitely hit on the engineering side, how to make it, but I don’t know if you’re going to be making much money. So it’s a no-brainer I think to most designers.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: So maybe before we go any further, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got to where you are.

JOEY ZELEDON: I actually knew I wanted to be an industrial designer when I was 13 or 14 years old.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: Wow.

JOEY ZELEDON: And actually before that. I was eight years old when I determined I wanted to be a shoe designer. That was the start to my career at eight years old.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: What was inspiring that? Was it a particular type of shoe or…?

JOEY ZELEDON: Yeah it was, I think at that time, this was the early to mid-nineties where the Nike Air Max and Air Jordans, Air Griffeys were really huge and I would go shoe shopping with my mum for you know a new school year, late summer, and we would go into Foot Locker, you know other shoe stores in the mall and I was just so obsessed with these artefacts, you know? And that emotional pull; the fact that they’re up on display on a wall when in reality they’re going to be on the ground all around your feet. I don’t know it was just this thing on a pedestal and the off gassing, it smelt wonderful. I don’t know.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: Oh I totally understand because I’m a bit of a sneaker head.

JOEY ZELEDON: Oh nice.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: So I understand. When I was around the same time sort of early nineties, sneakers became a real thing and I had the wings, the Michael Jordan Wings poster in my bedroom.

JOEY ZELEDON: Oh nice.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: Yeah, and funnily enough shoe design and definitely Nike, maybe not shoe design so much but definitely Nike. Although I did design shoe design at university and my great grandad he was actually a shoe, he was a shoe maker.

JOEY ZELEDON: Is that right?

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: Yeah totally, totally. So I think that there’s something really amazing about the connection that we have to these things that we put on our feet and it’s a phenomena. I mean did you watch the episode of ‘Contrast’ with Tinker Hatfield?

JOEY ZELEDON: I did yeah oh my gosh that was incredible, just so amazing and talented and just a cool guy.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: Yeah totally it’s just amazing. I think that just this way that people have connected over an object that we put on our feet and the way that they define us as well. You know you can tell so much from someone about the pair of sneakers that they have on.

JOEY ZELEDON: That’s, oh completely and also like speaking of human desirability, you know putting these things on a wall, you know up on a pedestal and telling these stories through yeah sure marketing gimmicks, I mean are those air pockets really adding much value, you know quantifiable improvement to your steps? I’m not sure. I don’t know how much that’s been proven but it sure does pull at the heart strings.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: Well you know I went into the Nike store here in New York the other day and they had the automotive lacing Nikes and I thought to myself ‘yeah, well not really sure that that’s adding anything to anyone’s life’. But you know anyway we could do a whole episode just about Nikes but before we get back into your story, did you have a favourite pair?

JOEY ZELEDON: Oh boy, actually I do. I have a favourite brand and this is a company that I did work for Clarks. Their Originals line, I’m a huge fan of. They aren’t sneakers technically they’re more just your classic brown shoes, originally from England. But I just love the simplicity of those shoes and the crepe band soles, the natural rubber.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: Nice, I’m kind of a stickler for some of the Air Max but the more obscure models. So I’m a big fan of structures or triax. I have quite a few pairs. I won’t go into how many because it would be kind of gross. But anyway getting back to your story.

JOEY ZELEDON: Sure. Yes I knew I wanted to be a shoe designer and then one summer my uncle asked me ‘hey what do you want to be when you grow up?’ And I said ‘a shoe designer’ and he said ‘alright well let’s go on Nike’s website and see what we have to study in school’. And sure enough it said product design or industrial design and so right then and there it was okay that’s what I’m going to school for. And it’s funny what happened luckily throughout school is I of course tried to spin every school project into some kind of footwear innovation.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: So good.

JOEY ZELEDON: And I quickly became known as the ‘shoe kid’. But in hindsight all of my non-footwear projects ended up being my favourites because I think I started to learn more about myself, what I actually really loved even more than being obsessed with this tangible artefact is storytelling and emotional storytelling. Footwear is one embodiment of that but yeah something inside of me was unlocked you know and the realisation, had an epiphany which was that, it wasn’t so much about shoes, it was about the feeling the shoes gave me and realising that hey I can apply this to anything. And I didn’t want to be just considered a one trick pony, not that there’s anything wrong with designing one type of thing throughout your career, you know it’s great if that’s what you’re into, but for me I really wanted to have this blanket effect, you know apply design process and this emotional storytelling to any industry.

So I actually did end up becoming a professional shoe designer post university. For a couple of years I was with Clarks in Boston, the US headquarters is there. I worked for Clarks Originals line and Banana Republic and then I quickly realised okay I need to jump ship and move into something broader now before I get typecast. Because I think that is a real thing in our field and so I moved onto Continuum in Boston which is a design and innovation firm for four years and then I also worked for four year at Smart Design in New York doing similar things, you know design consulting; working in a number of category industries, working alongside strategists, engineers, architects, interaction designers, service designers. I mean there it was just such a good experience for me and it broadened my horizons immensely and most recently, for the last two years, I’ve been working for Steelcase in the furniture and spaces and healthcare, more specifically, industry. So I then went from a kind of more tabletop product to now entire spaces in 12.03.07xxx architecture and furniture and so I’ve had quite a diverse background in design usually something tangible at the centre but what I’ve loved in everything that I’ve done is tried, at least tried to inject emotional storytelling and put it at the heart of whatever the narrative is supposed to be and really amping that human desirability element.

And I would say in hindsight the common threat throughout my career has really been touchy feely. It has been that emotional side to design. It’s just I didn’t realise it at the time and I think now I’m just packaging it up in a book but it’s something that I have been trying to practice for over a decade.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: Well that’s a great segue into what is touchy feely. Maybe you want to tell us what that is to you.

JOEY ZELEDON: So touchy feely to me is a loose framework for fostering empathy for human centred and inclusive design. Another way to say ‘touchy feely’ is emotional ergonomics and emotional ergonomics is really a fancy way to say and a very jargony way to say how we feel as humans when we interact with the world around us, with the physical world, the sensorial world. And we know the term as designers in the industry ergonomics, traditional ergonomics is the interaction between humans and the physical world but through a much more functional and technical lens, right. So we ask ourselves does this chair have the proper lumber support? You know how much force do you need to twist open this jar? You know give it to an elderly person, it’s more; give it to a younger person, it’s less. These are very quantifiable things that we learnt in school, you know we learnt about the human body through numbers, angles, geometry, charts, graphs. But wasn’t really taught formally, at least when I was in school, was that emotional side to the physical world. And that is what touchy feely is to me.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: Because after reading the book I spent a lot of time thinking about what touchy feely is to me. And again, it’s a saying that I’ve known for a long time, you know the touchy feelies. It can be used in both a positive or a negative way and the way that I was explaining it to myself was that the touchy is the interaction and the feely is the emotion that you have as a result. And it’s true, you can apply it to things that are tangible but you can also apply it to things that are intangible.

So I tend to design a lot of things that are less tangible but at least digital, in some cases. And there’s still a touchy component, even if it’s not a physical touch, although sometimes it is but say that it’s the moment at which you come into contact with something, whether it be a system or a process, there’s the touchy and then what you’re left with afterwards be it good, bad or otherwise, those emotional feelings that you have, that’s the feely. That’s my take on how you can interpret it for different types of design.

JOEY ZELEDON: I couldn’t agree with you more. I think you’re exactly right. And to be honest when I was writing this book, I definitely considered the intangible and though the name really does speak to the tangible. To me it’s really a jumping off point, you could take in multiple directions and it is very applicable across industries and specialties and design. But you know I think everything in, every interaction whether it’s digital or anything else, it’s always rooted in the physical world, right? Or rather the gestural world maybe or the sensorial world. I don’t know but I really wanted to keep it as open ended as possible.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: What was the very first time that you decided to go through this illustrative process with these touchy feelies? Was there one that got it all started?

JOEY ZELEDON: Yes actually there was. So this was back in 2010ish while I was working for Continuum in Boston. We were working on a project for a company where we were tasked with designing, it was a new kitchen cleaning product for the Chinese market and through research we discovered that the human was more fearful of the chemical in the cleaner than they were of the grime and the grease in their kitchen that they were trying to clean. And so after discovering that insight we then began to ideate ways that we can remove that fear, right? Remove the fear of using this product because that was the current emotion, those were the current touchy feely with this product. It was full of fear and this idea of ingesting these manmade or human made chemicals. It was really terrifying to this person. And so how we did that was we started to look around the kitchen and pull from more of the natural cues, you know, which coincidentally of course in the kitchen you have harsh chemicals when you clean but we also have food and 100% natural things that you cook and consume and eat. So we were looking at other activation gestures and the one that really resonated at the time and that stuck with me was the pepper grinder. And so this gesture of grinding pepper with this mechanism that most of us can relate to; you know we took that and did a quick prototype of the cleaner and put it in the pepper grinder and that simple act was like wow, that really turned over the stone of new opportunity. And so from there were started looking at other food related inspiration for pairing these things together. Now that’s not to say we didn’t just package together the same very chemically product. We actually did work with a chemist to create a more natural, an actually more natural solution.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: Yeah right okay that’s pretty cool. That’s pretty cool. You know I don’t want to give too much away about the book because of course I think that everybody should go and check the book out for themselves because it isn’t a book that you just read. It’s something that you take part in. But there was one particular touchy feely in the book that really resonated with me on a personal level.

JOEY ZELEDON: Oh yeah?

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: Yes.

JOEY ZELEDON: Okay let’s hear it.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: So I thought I would read it to you and then I will add my own feely at the end.

JOEY ZELEDON: Okay, sounds good.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: Okay, so here we go. Twist, tickle, too deep, massive build-up, scrape, prod, pull, after shower routine. Wax is so peculiar. They say not to. Some shampoo, compaction. Smells odd. Weird. Did I touch my brain?

JOEY ZELEDON: (laughs) Oh I love the additional one at the end. That’s so good.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: I actually have a cotton tip in front of me and I used one just before and I’m a little bit obsessed with making sure that my ears are clean, that’s one of my dirty little secrets, pardon the pun, kind of gross.

Anyway, I think it’s super interesting because when I cleaned out my ear just before, just earlier, I noticed the sound more. So thinking about the cotton tip itself and then doing the action I noticed the sound which often you don’t notice the sound. But I’d always been told if you go too deep with one of those things you’ll end up touching your brain and …

JOEY ZELEDON: Yeah same here, same here.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: I’m not sure that you can actually touch your brain with a cotton tip. I mean maybe.

JOEY ZELEDON: I’ve tried and no it’s not possible.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: It’s not possible. But yeah like it actually made3 me, there’s a book that is something that I’ve always loved. It’s called Perfume. It was made into a film a few years ago. It’s quite an old book. It’s definitely worth a read. It’s a book all about a man who, amongst other things, makes perfumes and I think I read it for the first time when I was about 16 and while I was reading it I was hypersensitive to smell and even to this day I have a hypersensitive nose. My sense of smell is very, very heightened. So you know I love thinking about things in this way because well I find that going through as a framework actually makes my sense of design, if you like, heightened. So I’m thinking more about the actual touch and the feel of what I’m trying to design for. It’s quite interesting.

JOEY ZELEDON: Yeah and that’s great to hear because that was definitely my intent to try to start to build that empathy. And yeah that one is one of my favourites as well, the cotton swab, because it does start to really bring to life or to the surface the universal feeling that we all have, I think, with that experience, with that integration which is uncertainty. You know a questionable use case, right? Questionable application. What are those really for? And we’ve all been told that it’s dangerous, you don’t want to go too deep. Well, how are you supposed to clean appropriately then, you know? Nobody’s really given the answer so to me that’s a business opportunity; you know if I’m a maker of those things and I want to really disrupt okay maybe you should start to think about you know how people feel when they use that item.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: Yeah well again this brings it back to this question of who were they really designing for when they were making those things? Were they really for people or was it some kind of, you know we think people need this so we’ll design it for the business?

JOEY ZELEDON: Yeah, yeah exactly.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: And then we get complacent and we don’t update that. But anyway so tell me about why you decided to make a book out of this. What happened to make you want to go down a book path?

JOEY ZELEDON: Great question. Well simply put books are just fun, you know it’s just a fun end product you know that’s fun to flip through. I think designers too just really like books so I was thinking about my audience as well. But before I even came to the conclusion to make it into a book, for the past two years I’ve been piloting the concept of touchy feely on social media, on Instagram in particular. So over the last two years every few days or so I would just post one illustration, one touchy, you know with my feely but then opening the dialogue up with a question; you know what is your feely from this interaction? And throughout two years I’ve gotten countless responses that I’ve saved and essentially crowd sourced for inspiration for when I actually sat down and wrote the poems, the feelys.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: So good. Was there a response that was the best response that you got?

JOEY ZELEDON: There was a lot of great ones and you know I can’t really think of one in particular but the thing that I really did try to do but well another reason by crowdsourcing too was not only was it helping me write the narrative, the copy for the book, but it was also feeding into that inclusive design approach, right. So what I really didn’t want to have happen was all of the feelys were coming from my point of view because that would be, well that would be going against the whole point of the book, right. So and each feely and each poem I tried to come at it from multiple view points and that probably was the most challenging part of writing this book because I would read through these 100 poems each time and think oh my gosh what am I missing? Who am I missing? What point of view is missing from this context? Who would feel something completely different from me in this context? And that was starting to drive me a little mad after a while. But that crowd sourcing approach you know over the past two years through Instagram that certainly helped in the process.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: You know I’m sure that there are listeners who have thought about writing a book, particularly designers who have thought about writing a book. I know that I’m a designer who has definitely thought about writing a book but I just have never gotten around to it. I’m using the inverted commas right now with my fingers. If you had any advice for people who were thinking about writing a book in that genre, what would you recommend?

JOEY ZELEDON: To make a plan, make a plan just like we’re taught for every design project, right. So you pull out your handy dandy calendar, make an outline, make a framework or actually or do that and then I would say use the future casting approach which is okay at the end of the day what in a perfect world what do you want to make? What would you absolutely love to make or write about? And kind of put that as a stake in the ground and then work backwards from there. So then you have to start asking yourself well in order to make that what do I need to do? What are all the little steps? Because it’s a long game, very much so. I mean it’s about patience and perseverance and it’s a lot of highs and lows of emotion.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: Yeah absolutely. Were there any books that inspired you to do this?

JOEY ZELEDON: Definitely. Actually not necessarily inspired me to do ‘Touchy Feely’ but I would say probably subconsciously worked its way in as I was creating this book which Demetri Martin, he is a comedian and a writer, not a designer, but I always thought he would make such a great designer, design strategist. He’s just so witty, so observant. He’s written a few books and just the way he sees the world, it’s very Seinfeld, right. It’s like, it’s funny because it’s true kind of a thing, you know? And I think watching Seinfeld re-runs, I’m a huge Seinfeld fan/nerd and the brilliance of that show is just its simplicity in observing the world; the little things, the tiny little quirks of humanity and putting it up on the stage for all of us to look at, point at and laugh and say ‘oh my gosh, yes, that is so true. I didn’t even think about it because it’s just such a mundane, every day thing’. And that certainly inspired me.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: And we will definitely post a list of all of the references that we’ve talking about in this episode in the notes on the website.

Just out of interest, I’m wondering firstly are you reading anything at the moment that’s really inspiring you and, two, what do you think makes a really great design book?

JOEY ZELEDON: I am currently re-reading ‘The Power of Now’. Have you read that one?

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: Yes.

JOEY ZELEDON: Okay and that one is also one of my all-time favourite books and is also a book that you can just up and read at the drop of a hat and anywhere in the book and get inspired or just get back to that present moment and yeah that book is just tremendous. And I think it has a lot to do with design too, you know the power of now. It’s a spiritual book which is all about, well I don’t want to butcher what it’s about in my interpretation but if I had to say what it was about, it’s really about staying in the present moment and in order to do that we need to as humans suppress the ego and thinking about the past and the future. And in my opinion in order to design something really special, really ground-breaking, really, something that’s really full of value and feeling, we need to do it in the present moment.

Of course we need to think about the past and learn from the past and look to the future and look at trends and how, you know where things are coming to a head. But in the act of designing something, I think it needs to be done in the moment. So that book, ‘The Power of Now’ has certainly been a huge inspiration for me.

And then to address your second question; what makes for a really great design book. I would say the element of surprise. It’s important to have a framework, lay it out, put it together but I think going through this process myself with ‘Touchy Feely’ something that I tried to build time into doing was kind of re-setting, re-calibrating, walking away from it for a few days, a week or two, coming back and looking at it, trying to look at it with fresh eyes and asking myself okay what is this really doing here? Is it really pulling at the heart strings, striking chords? Or is it just filler? You know because you do get to a point in creating something where you are kind of mid-flight where you’re doing it but sometimes you might lose sight of what you’re really trying to do and you’re just in the act of completing it. And so I think it’s really important to re-visit and really be super critical of what you’re creating and asking yourself will other people really enjoy this? And then of course asking your friends and family, you know people that will tell you the truth.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: That’s definitely words to think about. I went to a festival by David Lynch last weekend and I’m currently having a flick through ‘Beyond the Beyond’ a book about the music from his films and there was a lot about being present and transcendental meditation and some very interesting topics that came out of that particular set of talks and I think all these, you know being present is very important to what we’re doing.

So firstly I just want to know what’s next, what’s going to happen next for you.

JOEY ZELEDON: That’s something that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit. In the near term I need to fulfil all of my book orders and actually get people their pre-ordered ‘Touchy Feely’ books. So I have a lot of fulfilment.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: The actual touchy.

JOEY ZELEDON: That’s right. The very tedious job of fulfilment because we didn’t end up going with Blurb so Blurb does the fulfilment for you but we’re working with a small outfit in Berkeley, California who’s a book maker. So I’ll be doing that but if I muster up enough energy to create a sophomore album, if you will, I think it would be a specific touchy feely, right. So this first one is very, it’s a cross section throughout life, throughout the physical world and I think if I was to do another one it would be a touchy feely kitchen or a touchy feely hospital, right. So it would be very focussed and that way I can really dig even deeper. So that’s what I would, if I had to predict that would be my approach for the next one.
CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: I’m already looking forward to it. And before we wrap up this episode, I’ve got three hard and fast questions for you.

JOEY ZELEDON: Okay.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: If there was one professional skill that you wish you were better at, what would it be?

JOEY ZELEDON: That is a tricky one. I think folder organisation because oh my gosh it’s such a common thing, like how did my folders get all jumbled? And why am I naming them so all over the place? Like am I missing something? I think I just need to Google like ‘how to properly organise your folders on your desktop’. Maybe I’m revealing too much about my disorganisation.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: That’s okay. Once upon a time I had 40,000 unopened emails in my inbox and one of my friends saw it and wigged out.

Okay and then question two; what is the one thing in the design industry that you wish you’d be able to get rid of?

JOEY ZELEDON: You know it doesn’t make any sense to wish this but consumerism because that is I mean you know that’s like biting the hand that feeds me and that’s why it’s always so ironic and doesn’t make any sense because I’m talking here about human desirability, you know creating things and experiences that people want more of but at the same time I do have this other side of me that tugs at my heart saying make something that people will be so happy with they won’t ever need to replace it but that’s a big feat.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: I thought you might say ego but you know.

JOEY ZELEDON: Oh well ha ha you know.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: Damn it.

JOEY ZELEDON: You beat me to it. Yes, well then my follow up would be ego. Definitely ego. That’s a, I hate ego.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: And then finally, if there was one message that you could give to emerging human centred designers for the future, what would it be?

JOEY ZELEDON: It would be to embrace life experiences beyond designy or designery ones, right. I think we, as designers, get so hyper focused on looking for inspiration in the most obvious place; design blogs, you know design museums, other designers but it’s not, in my opinion, where the real value and inspiration lies. It’s in the everyday, it’s in the non-designers, you know it’s in the dishevelled life of some poor guy you know, it’s in just talking to random people, you know and going to random places where you won’t find designers, traditionally trained designers. So I think being open to all life experiences and really seeing it as tremendous value.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: Awesome. Well, I think there’s something in that for everybody so I just want to say a massive thank you for coming on the show and I can’t wait for ‘Touchy Feely 2.0’

JOEY ZELEDON: Thank you Chirryl-Lee this has been a pleasure.

CHIRRYL-LEE RYAN: So there you have it. I hope you enjoyed this episode of ‘This is HCD’ as much as I did. If you’d like to know more about Joey’s work, visit www.behance.net/joeyzeledon and if you’d like to get your hands on copy of ‘Touchy Feely’ the book, visit www.joey-zeledon.myshopify.com.

We’d love to hear your feedback or thoughts on this episode and anything else HCD. To join the conversation go to thisishcd.com and register to join our slack channel where you can get in touch. We use our slack channel to shape future episodes of the podcast as well as sharing interesting design and related content every day. We’ve also started a book review section and are actively looking for people to review design books. So if you’ve read a book recently or if you read ‘Touchy Feely’, join up and tell us all about it. We’d love to potentially include the review in a future podcast. We’re also actively looking for sponsorship for the podcast with 100% of the money raised going directly to Cara Care an incredible NGO who help support children who have suffered abuse. You can also donate by clicking on the dollar sign inside the media player on the thisishcd.com website.

Thanks for listening to this episode of ‘This is HCD’. I am Chirryl-Lee Ryan, see you next time.

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