RMV 35 Bonus Episode! Psychedelic Medicine x Design Pop Up at Stanford University d.school

Hello Results May Vary listeners, it’s Tracy! I’m excited to share this very special episode featuring a panel conversation on the topic of Psychedelic Medicine and Design. I recently co-hosted this live event at the Stanford University Hasso Plattner Institute of Design aka the dschool, with my teaching colleagues Elysa Fenenboch and Dr. Gianni Glick. 

We set out to explore the question, what IS the role of design as we transition psychedelic medicine from the research lab to medical clinics and journey spaces? How might they be used for the most good to individuals, cultures, and ecological ecosystems, including the plants and molecules themselves. 

Let me introduce our guests in order of how you’ll hear them in the recording:

Ismail Ali is the Director of Policy and Advocacy for MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies 

Dr. Allison Feduccia is a neuropharmacologist, psychedelic researcher and educator

Ayize Jama-Everet is an author, professor, producer, and guerilla theologian

Dr. Kyra Bobinet, who you may know from being a guest on this show twice, is also known as Me’me and is an enrolled member of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, and the founder and CEO of health tech company FreshTri

RMV 34 Katie Love: How To Design Your Love Life

The pandemic has taken its toll on many people's romantic relationships. How can passion thrive as the world starts to rebuild? Katie Love is a life designer and expert on the human heart. The RMV chat to her about how to build a co-creative relationship, how to re-spark passion and when to decide if a relationship is coming to an end.

RMV 33 Ashley Jablow: How To Strike A Balance Between Work & Life

The pandemic is forcing us to rethink how we work but how can you separate the home and the office if they're both the same place? Chris and Katia chat with life designer Ashley Jablow about how to overcome a toxic culture of excessive work. They also talk about the power of intuition and what true growth feels like.

RMV 32 Mollie Amkraut Mueller: How To Design Your Career

Life's too short to not love what you do but how should you approach that dream job? Mollie Amkraut Mueller founded the career-coaching company Crew to answer just that. Tracy and Katia chat to Mollie about incorporating life design into the job hunt and ask how to stay motivated in a bad job.

RMV 31 Gabrielle Santa-Donato: The Quiet Power of Grace

Gabrielle recently joined the Learning Team at Airbnb to create and deliver innovative learning experiences that help foster connection, unlock creativity and inspire action. Katia and Chris talk with Gabrielle about the fundamentals of life design, the potential for prototyping and practical steps everyone can take to unlock their full potential.

RMV 30 Lee Kim: Rediscovering The Wonder of Play

In early 2017 Lee Kim forgot her friend Tracy's birthday. What would be a moment of fleeting regret for many of us, instead sparked a creative journey for Lee and @wearabletracy was born. Every day Lee would wear a different birthday crown made from multi-coloured pipe cleaners. On the show, Lee Kim talks about how this simple act of play has radically transformed her life.

RMV 29 Alyssa Chang: How Can Neuroscience Change Your Life

Wellness expert Alyssa Chang talks to Chris and Tracy about the power of neuroscience. Based in sunny Honolulu, Alyssa's journey into brain-based coaching stems from a past career as a collegiate volleyball player. In the first episode of Season 3 of Results May Vary, Alyssa guides us through practical exercises that help improve the connection between our brain and body. Why not try at home too!

RMV 28 Bonus Episode! You Can Design Life After Vaccination

Dare to dream beyond the pandemic as Chris, Katia and Tracy guide you through life design in the age of Covid-19. In this bonus episode of the podcast, the team talks about how the vaccine offers a glimmer of light from fatigue and exhaustion. Also, how life can get harder when you get closer to the finish line and why it's important to keep moving forward.

RMV 27 Season 2 Finale: Ask Us Anything!

Today we are excited to wrap up our Results May Vary podcast relaunch with the sixth and final episode of Season 2! To celebrate, we’re switching up the format a bit by inviting our talented producer, Jenny Luna, to ask us the life design questions that came up for her while editing our material as a newbie to this work. Since we recorded all of the episodes before we launched again, we found it was a great hack for us to get feedback about what might resonate best for you no matter how familiar you are, or aren’t, with the design process. 

"Design thinking is fundamentally for each person to remember that they always have choices and they can choose how they want to design their options." –Katia

"When I think of design, I think of it as a creative problem-solving process. It's something that you do when you want to come up with new solutions to challenges that you have, whether that's business challenges or challenges in your day to day life." –Tracy

"Constraint is the perfect companion because the constraint focuses on the opportunity or the problem or where the creativity needs to shine, it gives us a focal point." –Chris

In the future, we’ll be opening up this Ask Us Anything format to include you! What’s on your mind about design, creativity, imagination, and experimenting in your life? What was inspiring? What’s still confusing? What’s altered your views? What have you tried? What worked? And more importantly, what didn’t work out so well and what did you do next? 

We’re so grateful to each and every one of you who took the time to listen to the show, shared it with friends, sent us messages of encouragement, commented in our FB group, and were brave enough to try a few new life designs of your own! Whether you found us again after our too-long hiatus or are tuning in for the first time, it’s been an absolute delight to reconnect and rebuild our community together. We’ve got even bigger dreams for next season, with new guests, new perspectives, and especially new ways to connect and experiment and play together! 

Have a wonderful rest of the holidays, wherever you are in the world! As challenging, chaotic, and confusing as 2020 was for so many of us, 2021 is our opportunity to design our world, and our own individual lives, to better reflect our dreams, values, and shared human potential. After all, as we say on the show, we are all born creators, and every day is a whole new chance to create! 

RMV 26 Purin Phanichphant: You Can Design Tiny New Rituals To Spark Joy Throughout Your Day

Today we are delighted to welcome artist, designer, and educator Purin Phanichiphant. With his roots in Northern Thailand, where he spent part of his life as a Buddhist monk, combined with his background in designing innovative products in Silicon Valley, Purin’s work reminds us to take a pause, play, touch, and take joy in simplicity.

Whether it’s rethinking cultural rituals or using art to examine the parallels between the universe and the brain, Purin’s interactive objects and installations engage people in co-creation.

Let’s listen in as Purin shares his perspective on the infinite potential of creativity, and how you can turn mindless routines into more mindful rituals, especially now when it’s harder to engage in the shared societal rituals we’ve always relied on.

Show notes:

Purin Phanichphant, Artist & Designer

Purin Phanichphant, Lecturer in Design at UC Berkeley

Purin’s Dada Meditations on Spotify

Minnesota Street Project, Art Gallery and Studio Space

IDEO, Global Design Firm

Purin’s art piece referenced in the show: Astro, Neuro, Art Exhibit in St. Ignatius Church, San Francisco

Elena Brower, meditation practitioner

RMV 25 Dr. Kyra Bobinet: You Can Design An Iterative Mindset

Today we are excited to welcome our first Results May Vary repeat guest, and author of Well-Designed Life, Dr. Kyra Bobinet. Kyra’s specialty is combining brain science & design thinking to serve the health of whole populations of people, and to challenge them and herself to live healthy fulfilling lives; physically, mentally, and spiritually.

Dr. Bobinet has spent her career working in the healthcare industry, building programs and algorithms to change behaviors at the million-person scale. Today she is the Founder and CEO of Fresh Tri, a simple, sustainable behavior change approach based on the brain science of habit formation. 

Let’s listen in as Kyra shares her thoughts on the brain behavior gap, and why it’s so dang hard to do the things we know we should; and how adopting an iterative mindset can offer you a more successful and compassionate approach to habit change.

Show Notes:

About Dr. Kyra Bobinet

A Well Designed Life by Kyra Bobinet

Fresh Tri App: Fresh Tri™ is a simple, sustainable approach based on the brain science of habit formation,
download on the App Store

CDC’s National Diabetes Prevention Program

Harvard Business Review’s article about Growth Mindset

Carol Dweck book on Fixed and Growth Mindsets

View Full Transcript

As always, thanks so much for listening to Results May Vary! We’d love to have you participate in the conversation we’re having about life design by joining our Results May Vary podcast Facebook group. That’s where we’ll share more tips, tricks and inspiration, and where you can share your own experiments with fellow community-members, who also know and believe that we are all born creators, and that everyday is a whole new chance to create!

RMV 24 Sasha Sagan: You Can Design Rituals To Celebrate Our Unlikely Existence

Today we’re thrilled and honored to welcome Sasha Sagan. Raised in a secular household by the astronomer Carl Sagan and writer and producer Ann Druyen, Sasha was taught that the natural world and vast cosmos are full of profound beauty, and that science reveals truths that are more wondrous than any myth or fable.

When she herself became a mother, Sasha began her own hunt for the natural phenomena behind our most treasured occasions — from births to deaths, holidays to weddings, anniversaries, and the simple ways we mark the rhythms of the everyday. Seeing life itself as worthy of celebration, Sasha authored the book, For Small Creatures Such As We, which thoughtfully explores how we might blend science and spirituality.

Let’s listen in as Sasha shares how she’s been creating a new set of rituals for her young daughter that honor the joy and significance of each experience. She’ll also share how you can design your own rituals to feel more connected to self, community, and the vast universe we’re all an integral part of.

Show Notes

Sasha Sagan’s website

Sasha’s Book, For Small Creatures Such As We

Ann Druyen and the Golden Records on RadioLab

NASA’s Golden Voyager Record

Contact by Carl Sagan

RMV 23 Dr. BJ Miller: You Can Design An Adventurous Life Inspired By Death

Today we are excited to welcome physician, author, speaker, and friend, Dr. BJ Miller. As a practicing hospice and palliative medicine doctor, BJ is best known for his TED Talk, "What Really Matters at the End of Life," and recently co-authored A Beginner’s Guide to the End, with the Editorial Director of IDEO, Shoshana Berger. He sees patients and caregivers through his online palliative care service, Mettle Health. And is the subject of Netflix's Academy Award-nominated short documentary, End Game. 

Let’s listen in as BJ shares his story of recovery from a life altering accident at 19 through his perspective of creativity instead of loss, and what opened up even further after he was introduced to the profession of design. We also dig into what death can teach us about living fully, and how design can help us overcome the fear of embarrassment and shame that often holds us back from the very life experiences we desire the most.

Show Notes:

Polio

The Washington Post’s article about renaming Palliative Care 

Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990

BJ’s Ted Talk

Shoshana Berger

A Beginner’s Guide To The End

Mettle Health:

View Full Transcript

As always, thanks so much for listening to Results May Vary! We’d love to have you participate in the conversation we’re having about life design by joining our Results May Vary podcast Facebook group. That’s where we’ll share more tips, tricks and inspiration, and where you can share your own experiments with fellow community-members, who also know and believe that we are all born creators, and that everyday is a whole new chance to create!

RMV 22 Introducing Katia Verresen, Our New Co-Host: You Can Design An Abundance Advantage

“Mindset is like glasses. It's the lens through which you see the world.” - Katia Verresen

Today we are thrilled to introduce you to Katia Verresen, an incredible woman who is not only the first guest of our Results May Vary relaunch and new season, she is also our new co-host! 

Katia brings her big belief in the power of design and the power of the individual. With Diane von Furstenberg calling her the fairy godmother of Silicon Valley, Katia’s passion is helping ambitious leaders achieve their full human potential by teaching them the mindset for growing their own internal and external power. And now we get to learn from her too! 

Let’s meet Katia and listen in as she shares more about how you can approach life through the lens of abundance and choice, and how to fit little pleasures for yourself into every single day.

View Full Episode Transcript

Show Notes:

Katia Verresen’s Executive Coaching practice

Katia’s Energy Audit article for First Round Review “The Brain Hacks Top Founders Use to Get the Job Done”

Katia’s article for First Round Review “The Remarkable Advantage of Abundant Thinking”

Diane von Furstenberg’s conversation with Katia for #InChargeAtHome

Domino Effect

Fight-Flight-Freeze Response

Jamie Oliver

As always, thanks so much for listening to Results May Vary! We’d love to have you participate in the conversation we’re having about life design by joining our Results May Vary podcast Facebook group. That’s where we’ll share more tips, tricks and inspiration, and where you can share your own experiments with fellow community-members, who also know and believe that we are all born creators, and that everyday is a whole new chance to create!

RMV 21 Saeeda Hafiz: You Can Design Healing Out Of Childhood Chaos

Saeeda Hafiz is a yoga teacher, author, and wellness expert. As a holistic health educator with the San Francisco Unified School District, she focuses on sharing her knowledge of physical and mental wellness within the school system.

On this episode of Results May Vary, Saeeda talks with Chris and Tracy about how growing up in a household of chaos, gave her the freedom to choose a different life for herself. Saeeda shares how yearnings for something else started out as intuition as a child, until she could put words to those yearnings as an adult. She works to set a tone for people on how they can care for themselves through food, movement, and holistic living.

Saeeda Hafiz is the author of The Healing: A Memoir of Food, Family and Yoga. You can learn more about her work on her website, saeedahafiz.com.

Read full episode transcript

RMV 20 Barbara Knickerbocker Beskind: You Can Design Aging

Barbara has been designing her life for almost a century, with a stint at global design firm IDEO starting when she was just 93-years-old. After seeing founder David Kelley featured on an episode of 60 Minutes, Barbara wrote to the company offering to help design for aging and low-vision populations. Hailing from the field of occupational therapy, after training through the U.S. Army’s War Emergency Course, and serving for 20 years before retiring as a major in 1966, Barbara’s own experience with macular degeneration led her to design glasses to help her and others with the condition. 

In this episode of Results May Vary, Barbara shares her fascinating story of personal reinvention, and how rather than allowing her illnesses and advanced age to hold her back, she simply used them as new constraints to redesign her life around.

RMV 19 Kristen Berman: You Can Design Your Behavior

Kristen Berman spends a lot of time thinking about human behavior. As a behavioral economist, she helps people make the changes that they want in the long term, but are hard to implement in the short term.

On this episode of Results May Vary, Kristen talks with Chris and Tracy about the ways our environment can alter our behavior and how incorporating small changes can yield giant results. Kristen shares strategies and tips on how to approach life from a behavioral economist’s perspective in order to “hack back” our lives and design the lifestyle changes we want.

In 2013, Kristen co-founded behavioral product design company Irrational Labs, with Dan Ariley. She also founded Common Cents Lab at Duke University, which aims to increase the financial well-being for low-to moderate-income people in the U.S. and abroad.

Read full episode transcript

Surprise, Listeners...Results May Vary is Back!

Updates from the hosts of Results May Vary

Surprise, listeners! It’s been quite awhile since our last episode, but that doesn’t mean you’ve heard the last of me and Chris, or the amazing individuals we’ve met who have been intentionally designing their own lives. In fact, we dug into the Results May Vary vault and found 3 previously unreleased, yet truly inspiring episodes that we’re excited to be sharing with you now. 

In addition, Chris and I have big news: we’d already been planning to launch a comeback even before Covid hit, and now seems like a particularly useful time for us to follow through! Because a quarantine can’t kill our creativity. In fact, now that our well-worn habits and daily and even institutional structures have been thrown out the window, this transition period is an unprecedented opportunity for all of us to imagine new futures for ourselves, our communities, and the world. 

And you know what? Launching a brand new season of Results May Vary isn’t even the biggest news. Chris and I are absolutely thrilled to announce the addition of a third co-host, Katia Verresen. Katia provides transformational coaching for inspired leaders at companies like Airbnb, Facebook, Refinery29, Mystery Science, and The New York Times. Her passion is to help ambitious leaders achieve their full human potential, and once you meet her in episode 1 of our new season, you’ll understand from her infectious energy exactly why we had to add her to our team. Another team member we’re infinitely grateful for is Jenny Luna, who joins us as our first ever professional producer. Jenny has made auditory magic happen on podcasts for Mother Jones and Stanford University Graduate School of Business, and we’re excited to have her do the same for us. 

So stay tuned. We’ll be launching our 3 Vault episodes soon. And will follow up with our new season in short order after that. 

Now without further ado, feel free to dig into the treasures we discovered in our vault. And then we’ll talk to you soon in our new season, starting off with our interview introducing you to Katia!

RMV 18 Stanford d.school Civic Innovation Fellows: You Can Design Impact at Scale

In our last episode, community architect Sandra Kulli talked to us about fostering human connection through the design of extraordinary places.

Today we are excited to share this very special episode of Results May Vary. We’re featuring this year’s Stanford d.school Civic Innovation Fellows, which this year was sponsored by Knight Foundation. This event was recently recorded live as the fellows wrapped up their program and reflected back on their journey of learning design thinking.

Fellows are “restless experts” in their field, accomplished professionals who are focused on accelerating large-scale impact. Over the course of the year, they learn human-centered design and use it to explore, experiment and advance ambitious projects in their sector.

You’ve already met one of the fellows. In Episode 16, Dr. Mick Smyer, talked about his organization Graying Green which is focused on tapping older adults as a resource for climate action.

Today you’ll also be introduced to Angie McKee, the Director of Innovation and Strategy for San Francisco Unified School District's Future Dining Experience. Her project uses student input to reimagine and redesign the school dining experience in order to make it more equitable and enjoyable for all students.

You will also meet Mark Brand, one of Canada’s most recognized social entrepreneurs. Having successfully created eleven businesses in Vancouver, Mark and his teams are determined to breathe new life into marginalized and isolated communities through food, training and meaningful employment.

Mario Lugay is a one-time community organizer turned philanthropy entrepreneur with his initiative, Giving Side. Mario explores bringing the best of technology to the best side of ourselves, testing initiatives that will catalyze and support our society's single largest, shared civic act: giving.

And finally, a fifth fellow, Sydney Smith-Heimbrock was unable to join the conversation. But her work is no less than helping make our government a workplace that unlocks creativity to solve the complex problems facing our Nation. Within the Federal government, she leads the Innovation Lab@OPM, where they teach human-centered design through workshops and immersion projects with Federal leaders and professionals.

Tracy had the honor of working with these fellows over the past year and we are pleased to introduce them to you today in partnership with the Stanford d.school.

Show Notes:

Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely

Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves by Christian Rudder, Co-Founder of OkCupid

Design Thinking Stokes: Workshop warmups

RMV 17 Sandra Kulli: You Can Design Community

In our newest episode, we introduce you to Sandra Kulli, a community architect, dedicated to creating extraordinary places that focus on fostering human connection.

As she practices the business and art of placemaking, Sandra is an advocate of thoughtful design and innovative problem-solving.

Starting her career as a teacher in a rich and vibrant inner city school system, over the years, Sandra has learned that community is local. And personal. So in her work, and her daily life, she is always looking to connect with others in a more meaningful way.

Today she shares her story and experience with us, including her 5 steps for building community well-being.

Show Notes:

Tres Santos in Todo Santos, Baja California Sur
Happy Planet Index
Daybreak, Salt Lake City, UT
The Pinehills, Plymouth, MA
MIT Age Lab
M Train by Patty Smith
Little City Gardens, San Francisco, CA
Ron Finley, Gangsta Gardener
Alone Together by Sherry Turkle
Ride-Arc, Los Angeles, CA
CicLAvia, Los Angeles, CA
Summers Corner, Charleston, SC
Inventing Desire by Karen Stabiner
XPrize
Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie