2021-01-14
1 小时 4 分钟So I got a question for you.
When was the last time you made a really good new friend, you know, as a grown up?
Like the kind that actually knows you, not just online, the real you?
Well, it turns out it's actually not so easy to create those kinds of friendships, but it's also really important in our ability to live good lives, especially during challenging times.
So my guest today, Kat Velos, she's here to help.
She earns her living as a UX designer.
And that means Kat figures out how to make experiences as easy and organic as humanly possible to step into.
And she applied her unique genius to everything from giant apps, platforms and technology, things like Slack and Pandora on a mass scale, all the way to local face to face gatherings, community building, and most recently, to examining and tackling the quest to form deep friendships, approaching it as a design problem.
So she goes deep into her journey of discovery in her really wonderful new book, we should get together.
The Secret to cultivating better friendships, which I loved and learned so much from.
And Kat has been featured in Forbes and Fast Company for her work as the founder of Bay Area Black Designers, which is a professional development community for black designers and UX researchers.
And over the years, really over the decades, she's created, run, and mentored a variety of communities focused on everything from spoken word poetry to photography to digital design to authentic connection and friendship.
Her most recent are better than small talk and Connection Club, which helps people really build community with each other as they also foster stronger friendships through the art of letter writing, which is super cool.
I wanted to go deeper into Kat's, her lens, her ideas and processes, and also explore them both in the context of making real deep friendships as adults and cultivating relationships and community, maybe even rising to that level of chosen family, both with people who see and move through the world in similar ways to us, but also with people who are not like us, and exploring how to embrace those relationships and build deep bonds of trust and friendship, especially in this day and age.
So excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is good life project.
There's a jumping off point that I think is fascinating that I absolutely have to know because I can't imagine there are many other people with your name, but it sounds like you came out with a hip hop math cd called musication in 2008, and I have to know about this.
That was me.
Yeah, it was a project from Deep in the Ice ages there, because at that time, so I had left a job as an art director and graphic designer working for a news magazine, and I left because I wanted to make a bigger difference in the world.
And one of the ways I did that was by quitting my job and joining Americorps and working in communities, doing national service.