In the new season of A76, I go beyond the industry noise to explore the designer’s mindset and why the ways designers see, question and make sense of the world are their most valuable skills. Drawing on over thirty years of experience and conversations with working designers, this season digs into the cognitive habits within design—the ways of thinking that turn noticing into understanding, understanding into action and that action into meaningful change. In an industry wrestling with AI and shifting roles, this season takes a different approach. Less jargon and more real talk about how designers actually think and how those habits can be learned and applied by anyone who’s looking to solve real problems.

I chat with David Kazaryan, a Senior Manager leading the revenue product team at United Airlines about a core habit often underrated—an iteration mindset. David traces his roots for iterating back to how he was raised, discusses his design education and the move from agency life into product design teams. We chat about perfectionism and setting expectations as a design leader. Plus why greyscale prototyping is surprisingly impactful. And finally we end it by welcoming AI agents to our design teams. In our volatile age of automation where designer's roles are quickly changing, this seasons going to be very poignant. Hope you enjoy this discussion as much as I did. We're just getting started.

In this episode, I sit down with Tom Quish, Executive Creative Director at Oh Hi, Hello, to unpack the cognitive habit of living in questions before chasing answers. Tom traces his path from animation and letterpress to UX and customer experience leadership and shares how that hands-on, exploratory instinct shaped his approach to design strategy. We dig into what premature solutioning looks like, why critique is one of the most powerful rituals for staying curious, how he navigates stakeholder pressure to move fast, and what AI is really changing (and not changing) about how designers find truth. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Walk Your Dog: Cognitive Habits of a Designer’s Mindset