Storytelling is a superpower of human-centered practitioners (among many others!). Capturing the richness of another's experience and the process of rendering it in an empathic, honest, and actionable way is core to our work. Core, and also complex.
Our guest for this episode is Dr. Umi Hsu, who works at the intersections of story, strategy, and culture. Umi is the Director of Content Strategy for the ONE Archives Foundation, which is the largest collection of LGBTQ history. Umi discusses their approach to curating stories that foreground lesser-heard voices, and doing so in an information-rich, attention-low world.
Get ready for a deep dive into history, story, and ways we can become more ethical interlocutors of experience, especially for driving change.
Show Notes
Check out ONE Archives Foundation's new podcast, Periodically Queer.
Put some of Umi's storytelling strategies into practice by checking out ONE Archives' AIDS history exhibition, Metanoia.
Read our profile of Umi to learn more about their digital strategy work for the city of LA.
Learn more about dscout Express, which we use to create our scout sound offs each week.
Register for People Nerds 2022—happening October 19—featuring Samin Nosrat!
Storytelling is a superpower of human-centered practitioners (among many others!). Capturing the richness of another's experience and the process of rendering it in an empathic, honest, and actionable way is core to our work. Core, and also complex.
Our guest for this episode is Dr. Umi Hsu, who works at the intersections of story, strategy, and culture. Umi is the Director of Content Strategy for the ONE Archives Foundation, which is the largest collection of LGBTQ history. Umi discusses their approach to curating stories that foreground lesser-heard voices, and doing so in an information-rich, attention-low world.
Get ready for a deep dive into history, story, and ways we can become more ethical interlocutors of experience, especially for driving change.
Show Notes
Check out ONE Archives Foundation's new podcast, Periodically Queer.
Put some of Umi's storytelling strategies into practice by checking out ONE Archives' AIDS history exhibition, Metanoia.
Read our profile of Umi to learn more about their digital strategy work for the city of LA.
Learn more about dscout Express, which we use to create our scout sound offs each week.
Register for People Nerds 2022—happening October 19—featuring Samin Nosrat!
Umi Hsu:
What it comes down to is really asking this question, for me anyway, when I do this work, how do we coexist? When there are all these stories that are out there, each one is a living organism of its own. They evolve, they change, they become narrative patterns that inform larger things like culture, policies, and ideology. How do we apply the principles of co-living and sustainability to storytelling? How do we tell stories while being sensitive to other stories that are also alive and living and thriving or fragile?
Ben:
Welcome to the People Nerds podcast, expanding your human-centered practice with unexpected sources of wisdom. I'm Ben, joined, as always, by my co-host, colleague and friend, Karen. Hey, Karen.
Karen:
Hello. It's me. the reason that I sound very peppy is I'm very excited about today's topic. Today, we are talking about stories and histories.
Ben:
Yep. We're storytelling about stories and it's such a relevant topic for the People Nerds's audience, many of whom conduct user-centered research, the goal of sharing user experience and can often do so with deliverables that are stories. And Karen, we have a fantastic guest to help begin, to make sense of some of these, the ways that we can be better storytellers. And who is that wonderful person?
Karen:
Today, we are talking to Umi Hsu. Let me tell you a little bit about Umi because, boy, they've done a lot of stuff. Umi Hsu is a public humanist and digital strategist who engages with research and organizing agendas for equity in arts, technology and civic life. Umi is currently the Director of Content Strategy at ONE Archives Foundation, and prior to this position, Umi led Design Strategy, Digital And Data Initiatives At the city Of Los Angeles Department Of Cultural Affairs. They've published extensively on digital media data and internet culture, and they've taught at the ArtCenter College of Design in the media design practices, MFA program, University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business and Occidental College. They are everywhere, but their main...
Ben:
Full stop.
Karen:
Right. But their main job right now at the ONE Archives Foundation, if you don't know, is forefronting celebrating through art and story, untold portions of LGBTQ history. So that is what Umi does. They are such a fantastic guest for us to learn more about story and the role that it plays in our lives. This is also not the first time, Ben, that you have met Umi, is that right?
Ben:
That's right. I met Umi a few years ago. We profiled them on the blog. We'll drop that below. When they were working for the city of LA, specifically on trying to find ways that the city could encourage public arts that resonate with the communities, specifically... Like Chicago, People Nerds's headquarters, whoop whoop, our neighborhoods are such a strength of this place. Neighborhood by neighborhood there's wonderful histories, which we will be talking a bit about that role in importance of history to their work in storytelling, specifically. LA is much the same. So I met Umi when they were working on more ethnographic, immersive sorts of research with the intention of creating public arts that support the community, ensure that the community's own history is told accurately, that there was representation in programming that the Los Angeles public works folks and folks thinking about services and supports could create, that would, again, resonate with folks. Just thinking much more in a much more nuanced way about how art functions for the folks in different neighborhoods.
Ben:
So I think Umi is an amazing person to have on for a whole host of reasons, but they are, as I think you will hear, a very considered storyteller, and they do so while leading a team. They have done so across different sorts of channels, across certainly with budgets and timelines in mind. And so whether you're a designer, a product lead or a user experience researcher, I think you'll come away from this conversation with ways that you can tell more ethical or inclusive stories that will resonate and that can drive action. What stood out to you, Karen? What can listeners look forward to in our conversation?
Karen:
Oh my gosh. So much. I feel like I was starting to write down a list of highlights and it was just everything we talked about.
Ben:
Just copying the whole podcast.
Karen:
Let me just copy the transcript and read it out to you here. No, there was a lot that stood out here. You can definitely look forward to hearing more about Umi's current projects at ONE archives, particularly their podcast Periodically Queer, what they feature there and why. We also get this great behind the scenes look at how Umi and their team put intersectional storytelling into practice, really, boots on the ground information about how that is operationalized, how they can keep track of their responsible storytelling and archiving.
Karen:
We also get real philosophical at times and we're talking about the nature of story itself, how to conceptualize it and what Umi's role and perhaps, by extension, all of our roles are or can be as storytellers and collectors and broadcasters. And then lastly, we do talk a fair amount about strategies to craft stories that are going to resonate with stakeholders or audiences, all while operating within limited budgets and timelines. So there's a lot to cover here.
Ben:
Yeah. So let's get into it. Here is our conversation with Umi Hsu.
Ben:
Welcome, Umi Hsu to the People Nerds podcast.
Umi Hsu:
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me here.
Ben:
We have so much that we are jazzed to talk with you about. You are an expert storyteller, digital strategist, cultural researcher. There are so many things that we believe that you'll bring to our audience, but as we said in our intro, you work with the ONE Archives Foundation at present, and so I'm wondering if we could start there. Could you describe your team, it's mission and some of the things that you've been working on lately?
Umi Hsu:
Of course. So at ONE Archives foundation I lead content and it is sort of content broadly construed. We have a tiny and mighty team. We have a communications person. We have an intern who supports exhibition programs and podcasts and things like that. And we also have an exhibition sort of media and production consultant that we work regularly with to make sure that all of our media products look great when they come out. We also work really closely... As an organization, we're a nonprofit 501(c)(3). We put out arts and cultural products such as exhibitions, web exhibitions, podcasts related to LGBTQ history and storytelling. So we work really closely, we collaborate with ONE Archives at the USC library. We are kind of the programming partner to the archive, which organizes and maintains the archival collections.
Ben:
Yeah. Thank you. First of all, we will absolutely drop a link to the ONE Archives Foundation in the bio below. I'm very excited to talk with you about and I hope we can linger a bit more on the role of, and I mean, you and I were talking in our sort of pre-show about the roles of history and storytelling, and then the way those things mix. I'm wondering if we could start with the podcast that you recently published, Periodically Queer, please check it out. If you haven't, we'll drop a link to that below. What were you trying to do with Periodically Queer and what are the roles of history and story in that podcast project?
Umi Hsu:
Thanks for the question. So, first off, I will start by talking about the mission of the organization, which is standing on the shoulders of history while offering insights into the present and the future. I often say that our role is not only storytelling, but it is doing so while looking back at the past and present and into the future all at once. So how do you describe that? Omni-visible? What kind of vision is that? Tri-directional omnision? I don't claim that we do anything like that, but I think it is sort of this multitasking, multi-gazing effort, multidirectional ways of engaging with materials, such as content.
Umi Hsu:
Periodically Queer is a podcast that explores the history of LGBTQ community building. Of course we do so in this first season by looking at print media. That gives us a historical period that we're interested in and for season one, we took a deep dive into magazines, newsletters from organizations from 1980s, '90s, and early 2000s, with a focus on organizations that serve queer and trans people of color. You probably noticed a whole lot of framing in how I just presented that, sort of social framing, historical framing, the who, the time, the when, and of course, the location, the where.
Umi Hsu:
Our stories focused around three periodicals, one is Lavender Godzilla, which is based out of the San Francisco Bay area. They started in 1988 in Berkeley, California. And then we took a deep dive into Los Angeles where this incredible international queer underground network of Iranian people have gathered and printed this magazine called Homan, and Homan magazine has impact worldwide. Participants told us stories about how they had to sneak magazines into Iran and the dangers that they had to experience in doing so, all the risks that they sure that they took. And then the third episode went on to describe the intersectional coalition building efforts in the 1990s in New York City in the context of this organization built by women of color.
Umi Hsu:
I think framing is a big thing for us, really, really be specific about the historical, so the temporal dimension of the stories that we want to tell, but also the geographical and social. I think us being a history organization, we have this responsibility in telling history, not only in an accurate manner, but also diving into history, historical stories that resonate with today's audience. And of course these things are always shifting. Stories are evolving. What's relevant today may be not the case tomorrow. So I think, for Periodically Queer, we took the initiative to want to dig into the history around unsung heroes, people that you don't hear so much in mainstream media in the way that they cover pride.
Umi Hsu:
There are the people that have made it, cut through the mainstream media sphere and could reach other people. And then there are the people who have been doing work, community organizing, community-building work quietly but have been making amazing changes from where they were, and those were the people we wanted to zero in on and give them the floor so that they can tell their own stories.
Umi Hsu:
Stories can do that, can expand the horizon, expand the consciousness of how we feel about ourselves as a community, as members of the LGBTQ community. There are feelings of isolation, questions about belonging are always, always present in our community, especially around youth. So our purpose in doing this work is to really be asking the question of who else is there, who else has been doing work beyond the people that we already know?
Umi Hsu:
So for episode one, we dived into the question of queer ancestors to think about, "How have we been finding our families?" Chosen family or birth family. Or ways in which queerness can exist within the family structure that's in our society that are hidden and tucked away. We honed in on a story that was published in a magazine and the author of the magazine went back in a rare book and found a historical photograph of a gay ancestor from 1870s, and yeah.
Karen:
That's awesome.
Umi Hsu:
Having this multi-generational connection through having this deep storytelling with the author, who in 1980s found this photograph, which at the time was a hundred years old by now, it's almost 150 years old. And just describing his identity as a Filipino gay man and searching for traces of people who are like him, who are a man-loving man and who have endured a lot of the colonial erasure during the time that the person had existed. So anyway, I think using stories as a way to expand our sense of place in this larger universe, and that's particularly meaningful for queer individuals when we cannot take family for granted. Family could sometimes be a space of danger and not a space of belonging, so in creating our own family, our own ancestors, I think locating ourselves in that universe is actually a big part of that work.
Karen:
Such important work. I'm curious if you could speak more on your role in all of this. What do you see your own role as in this big network of stories that are waiting to be told? And what are some of the values that you kind of aim for in that role, or perhaps some things that you are trying to avoid in that role?
Umi Hsu:
I think of myself as somebody who is that little figure who has to stand on the shoulder of history. I'm on the coast looking out into this ocean of stories. And of course, there are lots and lots of stories, lots and lots of living organisms beneath the sea level and uncovering that work. But how do I choose a question? What's an inquiry that allows me to dive in? That's my work. I have to develop that sensitivity to know what's happening at shore. What are people whispering about? What are the things that they care about? What am I hearing across the land? How do I use these impulses that I have to find different entry points into this big ocean, this big sea of stories and information and narratives?
Umi Hsu:
It's this sort of interesting work, I have to be on my toes. I have to keep my ears really, really sharp, attuned to what people are saying at the moment. But I also have this responsibility. Diving into the ocean is this thing. What I choose to dig from there, what I choose to uncover, what I choose to harvest itself and deliver back out to those of us who are not doing the fishing work, that in itself is something that I think a lot about. What do I bring back to the people and how do I do that? What stories do I tell and how do I tell them? Those are the things that are on my mind daily when I do this work.
Ben:
I'm wondering if you could speak to the methods. That work, it sounds to me as ethnographic, you are embedding in those communities, listening to these folks. But I want to tug a bit on what you just referenced there wherein you, there is some responsibility in sharing those stories with organizations who hope to create programming or archive experiences. Is there a set of methods that you have found that help you ensure that stories are authentic and resonant with the communities who are sharing them?
Umi Hsu:
This is a good moment for me to reflect on what I have been developed since I started this job three years ago. I started the job right before the pandemic, so the typical work of going to the archive, requesting for an archival box and digging into the folders, all of that, had to change. The archive was closed for a while, so we had to rely on digital repositories of archival information. How I've worked has been this sort of gazing at the present moment. That's spending a ton of time on social media, really reading and listening, but also taking the time to mark our moment, meaning, to derive larger patterns that are in our current media ecosystem, and to note that these are stories and stories are like living organisms. They evolve, they change.
Umi Hsu:
How do I keep up? How do I historicize? How do I link it to larger cultural shifts and ideology? So that gets into like longer form media consumption like podcasts. But also, longer form articles and commentaries. To be honest, I've had lots and lots of communications and direct conversations with people. This is not unlike the work that I was doing at the city of Los Angeles, getting into the neighborhoods, talking to people to see what's meaningful to them, culturally significant experiences that they've had. I'm doing the same thing. Always keeping myself available and open for dialogues with people. And I work really closely with the artist community, the creatives within LGBTQ plus community. And then looking and listening to what they're thinking of, the questions they're asking.
Umi Hsu:
What it comes down to is really asking this question, for me anyway, when I do this work, how do we coexist? When there are all these stories that are out there. Each one is living organism of its own. They evolve, they change, they become narrative patterns that inform larger things like culture, policies, and ideology. How do we apply the principles of co-living and sustainability to storytelling? How do we tell stories while being sensitive to other stories that are also alive and living and thriving or fragile?
Umi Hsu:
I think that work is a lot of listening, but it's also a lot of reflecting, rapid reflections, if you will. If you can take a pause and just... I do this, take a pause and just say, "What is happening? Has this happened before? Let me go to the archive. See if there are any larger patterns that we can derive." And then try different search terms to try to get into the mindset of history, historical moments and see if there are similar or different things happening, what could be an arc. So this work is like backwards-looking and forward-gazing, but doing so while maintaining the ground of our moment of what's relevant and what's interesting of our time.
Karen:
Well, we want to take just a brief moment for a break to take us over to our Scout Sound Off, but we will be right back in just a moment with more conversation from Umi Hsu.
Ben:
Welcome to our Scout Sound Off where we check in with folks about a topic from the pod. We do this using Dscout Express, which is a quick turn qual [inaudible 00:24:47] tool purpose built for stories and experience feedback. As we're hearing today, Umi is really committed to foregrounding voices and perspectives, as well as experiences around queer identities. So we thought we would do the same and ask Scouts about their own identities, their own connection with history and the stories that are important to them. Karen, what did you do this week and what did we learn?
Karen:
This week, as you said, we were really interested in connecting directly with our Scouts who identify as in the LGBTQ plus community. This week, I wrote a quick survey and I fielded out and within about, I would say, a couple of hours, we had heard from 60 Scouts who identify as members of the LGBTQ plus community. We were asking about queer representation in media, art and literature. We asked people how important they felt it was to see queer stories represented in the media and perhaps unsurprisingly, 94% of our respondents said that it was either important or extremely important to them. So we asked a follow-up question about why.
Karen:
We heard a lot of really interesting answers, but one of the top themes that arose to the surface was community, a sense of belonging and being part of a larger storyline. We heard from our Scouts that growing up queer can be a really isolating experience, one that produces a lot of confusion in emotions and identity invalidation from those around them, because there's no one else with a similar experience to share, compare feelings or take any lessons from. So representation in media has helped folks feel like they belong to a larger community, a larger storyline, and that they're not alone, but that's enough for me. Let's hear it straight from our Scouts.
Speaker 4:
Queer stories are important for the same reason anybody's stories are important. Without stories, nobody knows you exist.
Speaker 5:
I'm a firm believer that we as queer people are everywhere and that when we have media that doesn't reflect us as everywhere, it's very easy for other people to establish worlds in which they do not see us.
Speaker 6:
That's why queer media is so, so vital because this is the thing that tells kids, "Okay, there are people like me out there. I'm not alone."
Speaker 7:
You feel connected even if you don't personally know people.
Speaker 8:
It makes me more comfortable feeling the way I am.
Speaker 9:
That's what everybody wants is validity of their feelings of themselves. And so seeing queer stories of like, "Hey, you can fall in love with this person and there's nothing about it." This could be you and it gives you validity and hope.
Speaker 10:
Especially when you don't have somebody to talk to. So it is uplifting for younger generations when they can't even talk about what's going on in their life. They have somebody to look up to. So most people look up to their shows, their stars, as being them. It gets them through their everyday life.
Speaker 11:
It just helped me feel like I'm a part of the world, I'm a part of the community, the larger community, and that my stories are valid. My story is accepted and that people are interested and watching it.
Ben:
Thanks very much to our Scouts for sharing their experiences. If you'd like to start capturing empathy-rich stories or add an always-on element to your UX toolkit, check out dscout.com. And now let's get back to our conversation with Umi.
Karen:
And we are back with Umi Hsu. The first question we wanted to ask you is about what we've already been talking about, which is surfacing stories from less heard from communities, communities that have not had the opportunity to be platformed, stories that have not had the opportunity to be surfaced and to be shared. I'm curious if you have any thoughts or strategies to share about how we can think about methods or framings or ways of researching and communicating to bring those stories to the foreground and have them resonate with wider audiences.
Umi Hsu:
I think of stories as a form of an economy. Each storytelling, each instance of a story is an economy in which that what you focus on, the characterization and what their voice is, what they say, all of that is the work of focusing, honing in on a particular pattern. That is often done in relation to the rest of what's there, what you cut out, what you cut through in terms of noise. So this work is economizing material, it's economizing content. In doing so, we're necessarily having to cut out other voices and we're having to leave out perspectives. This is that tricky thing that we do. In storytelling, there's the ethic of who do we focus on and who do we not focus on?
Umi Hsu:
I don't have kind of a universal principle, but I just know that each instance when I'm doing this work, I am running the risk of cutting out other people, eradicating other potential voices that could be heard. In general, I think, given our mission of having to tell authentic and intersectional stories, intersectionality becomes a kind of operating principle for me. How do I get into a space while thinking about multiple dimensions of social experience and enliven people so then there are multiple ways in which that they can engage with their lives? How do we keep track of the multiple dimensions of a person or a character?
Umi Hsu:
We have a fairly complicated set up in Airtable to dig into how we record stories. We write stories and the copies come out in multiple different... Eventually they come out in different channels, obviously, but each instance of a copy, we lean into a particular person, historical figure. Then we make sure that person's dimensionality can come out based on the final product, a short message such as a Tweet versus a longer form like Instagram, picture essays, that's what we do. We do photographic essays on Instagram, and then we do video content that allows audio to come in and enhance the storytelling. So in each instance of the product, we're able to pull out instances of the dimensionality that I was talking about.
Umi Hsu:
Then we historicize it. So if this is coming out on Juneteenth, we give it the story that's most significant for Juneteenth to celebrate the end of slavery in this country. Historicizing is something that we try to do, and we write that into Airtable. We have columns where we tag the sort of historical event that's important that we want to tease out. We tag, for instance, the name of the person, their demographics and then we also tag the final delivery channel. By the time it comes out, it's going to come out of here. So it gives us a set of data that we can then go back and look back on and have our own kind of historical log, essentially our archive of content data that allows us to dig in when we need to derive larger patterns of whose stories have we left out, whose stories have we focused on. Then it's not just all out there on social media and then we don't have any sort of reflective methods of looking back on what we've done. So we've created these systems to do that.
Ben:
You are doing this critical work with critical communities in very dynamic formats and channels, photo essays, the podcast we've been discussing, certainly written works. When you're working in an industry environment, have you any strategies or tactics that you've used to help make stories actionable to stakeholders who have budgets and timelines?
Umi Hsu:
This is kind of the question. I think we're all trying to figure out how we can tell effective stories and how to create actions based on the stories. One thing we do, and I think we do fairly well, is that we lean into our strength as history people. That's like historians work. Give a container to a story. What I mean by that, it's the frame. So give it a container. What's the frame? A container that can help us focus. And of course this has ramifications in the attention economy. When we're in this moment, when there's so much information, so much buzzing happening, a container helps us in a sense that it puts our minds in the space so we can stretch in it and expand it without being harmed or subject to distraction.
Umi Hsu:
That work I do to the stories that we tell, give it a container, give it a historical moment that we're marking, give it a day that we're celebrating, give it a policy that's being made or being proposed. We try to engage with a new story. All of that work of container giving is just basically saying that we need to focus on what's happening here and now, and let's link it to what has already happened in the past, because ultimately that is what we're delivering, historical stories.
Umi Hsu:
I would say the containers that we work with, generally, can do a few things. They can kind of enliven what happened in the past, enliven history, enliven the story that we want to tell. It could also do this work of reparative storytelling. It could shift the narrative. An example, it was like, "Hey, you think this is what happened? But actually this is not what happened. This other thing happened." So, narrative change. A common way that we engage with this is the story of Stonewall, which like I said, mainstream media understands it as the beginning of the LGBTQ movement in this country, but actually we say there are these other players who have already been doing work and guess who they are. These are the people. Who are they? What are their demographics? What are their convictions?
Umi Hsu:
The last thing I would say, another container that's really helpful is the reflective one, allowing people to do a rapid reflection into what's happening now based on what had happened already. An instance of this is when COVID first started, we were in that moment of, "Oh my God, this is a pandemic. Have we had a pandemic in our lives?" And we look back on AIDS history and said, "Oh look, something like this did happen before and in fact it impacted millions of people." These are stories that probably mainstream Americans didn't know about, but let us do the work to reflect on what we learned from healing justice and all the mutual aid, collective care infrastructure that were built and has been continued to be built. So anyway, that rapid reflection on the past and then giving people an entry into the future into something that can be hopeful.
Karen:
I guess I'm curious about somebody who is in the role of collecting and curating and containing, providing stances and containers for these stories. Again, probably using in the constraint of budget, timeline, I'm curious about how personally, how do you make space for yourself to be so empathetic and invested and creative, all while working with some very hefty, hefty stories and topics and all within these time and budget constraints?
Umi Hsu:
When the pandemic started, I promised myself that I would do one thing that is care oriented for myself every day. So it became this little exercise. It was kind of a game, but also felt like I have, I've done experimental music. So I thought I was basically creating a score for myself, to do one thing at a time, one thing a day. So I started to explore different things. Every day, I wrote a little score and I did it as an Insta story, day one, pour tea, pour slowly and drink it slowly while tasting and almost eating elements of this drink. I would like basically find different ways to engage with my daily practice. And then I shared it on social media and I had these 15-second tips basically for people. And then in some instances it's just me watering a plant or sketching a bug.
Umi Hsu:
All those things I got to do for myself, I got to learn how to be present with myself and I made the space to explore because I actually didn't know how to do that. I thought I knew, I have this daily meditation practice, I cultivate mindfulness, I have all these structured embody practices that I also do like Aikido, but I actually didn't... I knew that drinking tea could help, but I didn't know what part of it. So I gave myself the time to really develop what those elements are. What are the characteristics that really help me ground myself, help me become more empathetic, help me create a space for me and those around me and help me feel safe and be creative and then to be sensitive. I mean, this work of listening to stories really involves a lot of listening and being sensitive to the feelings of our time and also for me being sensitive to the feelings of our past, the archival feelings.
Umi Hsu:
So all that work of, just giving myself a little break, five minutes a day to explore what can work. And it was this fabulous series and I ended up doing it for more than three months accumulated, over a hundred videos.
Ben:
Wow.
Umi Hsu:
Yeah. I discovered new habits.
Ben:
Yeah, sure.
Umi Hsu:
Yeah. It was great.
Ben:
You're a director of a team and doubtless your colleagues, the folks you are mentoring and collaborating with were feeling their own, experiencing the pandemic in their own ways. Did any of that self scoring come through in your mentorship or your management or in your daily interactions with your colleagues?
Umi Hsu:
Absolutely. All the reflective work that I was doing, I found a way to make more space for conversations that become more present with others to invite dialogues into work settings, especially having to be remote all of a sudden. That meant creating other forms of spaces.
Umi Hsu:
I started a humanity channel on Slack where folks can post things that are completely outside of work just so that we can be more human with each other. So that's anywhere between events that we are personally involved in as a creative or artist or even just the plants that we're growing or cats that we have. And some of the practices like drinking tea, I've managed to find ways to do that remotely, too, with folks.
Umi Hsu:
And of course that's something that I had already done and cultivated as somebody who leads a team. I would invite people into my office and drink tea with me and talk about content or framing or messaging in a creative way, making sure that we are comfortable with each other and our nervous systems are attuned to each other before we dive in. Tea can do that really well. This kind of surprised me how I answered this question by the way.
Karen:
And that was Umi Hsu. Thank you again so much, Umi, for being on our podcast. If you want to learn more about Umi and their work, you can go to their website at beingumihsu.info. You can also check out their podcast Periodically Queer and their absolutely fantastic work at ONE Archives, including a recent exhibition, Metanoia, about the examination of community-based responses to the ongoing aids crisis, highlighting in particular, the contributions of cis and trans women of color. We will drop all of those links below in the show notes.
Ben:
And if you haven't already, please subscribe to be notified of our latest episodes, and, I'm serious, we read these, please write a review. Karen and I are People Nerds, we're nerdy about what you think. You can also check out our full library of human-centered resources, including how-tos and breakdowns at peoplenerds.com. And finally, if you'd like to incorporate any of the practices we talk about on this podcast from storytelling to mixed methods approaches, please check out dscout.com, which offers a whole range of tools that you can use.
Karen:
One last thing, we do have a really big digital event coming up on the horizon and we would love to see you there. People Nerds 2022 is going to be an all day digital event hosted by the People Nerd's team with a variety of speakers from across UX and outside of UX, including Samin Nosrat, famous chef, who will be our keynote speaker this year. You can find a link to register in the show notes.
Karen:
And that's all for us this week, tune in down the road for more interesting conversations and food for thought from outside the borders of UX. Thanks again for listening. See you next time, nerds.
Ben:
Bye, nerds.