In Episode 104, we had the pleasure of Kelly Goto joining us for that episode, and she was fresh from the Enterprise UX Conference put on by Rosenfeld Media. She talked a little bit about how she was incorporating user experience research into just working with the enterprise in general and about how that’s a culture shift for a lot of these big organizations that are focused on doing one thing very well, but usually that thing is not user experience.

That’s how we started out on this theme. Then a few episodes later in 113 we talked to your friend Suzanne Livingston who is over at IBM working with their social software division. She’s a product manager there. IBM is really responding to the bring-your-own device trend and the consumerization of the enterprise. It’s notable, when IBM is starting to pay attention to user experience and the consumerization of all this, you know that there’s a lot of money to be made there. Then our third episode that falls under this theme was Episode 127 that I did recently with Uday Gajendar, who was —

It’s really essential to have good enterprise UX, both from the bottom line productivity standpoint the bean counters would point to, but also from just the standpoint of humanity and the folks who are forced to toil away on this stuff. I’m glad to see that finally the world is turning towards that. Jon, as you well know, one of the reasons that clients cite for working with Involution is that we do enterprise software that feels and acts like consumer software, which is code for easy-to-use, pleasant, and enjoyable. It’s really how all enterprise software should be. I’d go so far as to say it’s criminal that it’s so bad.

I think this is similar. This is the masses getting into enterprise UX. A lot of the more interesting things have already been talked about and moved on from. Now it’s to the point where it’s all pretty generic, pretty straightforward, so now it’s getting the mass appeal because more people can understand it and get their heads around it. It is the rise of enterprise UX on one hand, but on the other hand, it’s also a sign that the more interesting things are behind us, and for people who are more inventors instead of optimizers, it might be a time to put your head into a new space.

For me, that’s one of the episodes where I feel like it really hit the nail on the head in terms of just the struggle that people have with an always-on working environment and finding a new culture that embraces both time at home with your family, with your friends, but also this always having the sineyus connected to the business and always being able to be drawn in at a moment’s notice. One minute you’re with your family eating, and the next moment you’re on a conference call for some fire to put out. Time poverty, right? That’s the other side of productivity, and I thought that was a great theme.

Then, of course, in March every year there’s the annual creative class pilgrimage to Austin known as South by Southwest. That has just grown by leaps and bounds over the year. One of the questions we asked in that episode was whether or not that was the big tent revival of the religion, the place you go to get baptized, as it were, in creative class stuff for the year. You can check out that episode and see whether you think that’s the evangelical high point of creative class stuff.

In Episode 112, we talked about maybe the darker side of all this creative class work, especially in the software industry, which is you’re automating away some jobs for people, right? We talked about automating America and some of the problems that that causes and how it forces everyone to up-level their skill sets as computers and robots start to do more of the commodified work.

Then in Episode 121, we touched a little bit on the idea of the open organization, which is fuel for the new, what do you call it, the new way work is structured. We talked about how there are certain companies where ostensibly you can see the salaries of everybody on staff and it’s a flat hierarchy and all ideas are valued as, no matter where they come from, to encourage innovation. I think we both took a slightly simple viewpoint on that.

All of those, you can see the threads of creative class work, and it’s a fascinating time because we still are really transforming from an industrialized society. Those were maybe the four or five themes of the year, but they certainly don’t end with year’s end. Dirk, I know that you have all kinds of creative pursuits and each one informs the other. What was your take on creative class work in 2015 or any other themes I just mentioned?

The example I’ll use is something I read this year. I don’t think I talked about it on the show. Maybe I did. There’s a profile on Zappos and founder Tony Hsieh, and it was talking about his philosophy. I’m going to screw up the details, so I won’t get too detailed with it to avoid making errors. At the end of the day, it’s using this particular philosophy of evolving to the better workplace, and the optimal type of workplace is called teal. They’re all colors. Teal is what Zappos is aspiring to. As I’ve researched it more, teal is this very interesting, progressive, liberal-minded, open, all these good things, system. However, it’s not good for many personality types. It’s good for very specific personality types who deal well with ambiguity, who don’t need a lot of structure, who are cool with things changing in different ways, who are happy with throwing out all of the old metaphors and coming up new terms for the sake of new terms, among others.

To me, it’s the best example of how work towards wonderful, creative workplaces today is still in the stone age, because even the most progressive of companies, even the most lauded of the superstar, rock star CEOs trying to push this better agenda continue to whittle people down this little gauntlet that’s great for some, okay for others, and shit for a whole bunch. The open workplace is another example of that. Scott Barry Kaufman, who I follow on Twitter … I’d recommend all of you do as well, sbkaufman at twitter. He recently was talking about … I don’t know if it was on his podcast or on Twitter … about how now there’s good science around the open workplace crushing the productivity of introverts. Open workplace is the signifier of modern, progressive, liberal, right way to do it, but it’s completely shutting down and screwing up a key portion of your workforce.

Maybe this could have been one of my predictions last week. I think we’re going to see good science this year really starting to push us toward a more holistic workplace, not one that’s taking a certain dogma that’s good for some and not for others, but something that really is thoughtful and balanced to help a large majority instead of just different fiefdoms.

We started out with Episode 89 talking about smart cities and the Internet of Things, just as an example of one technology that is starting to come to the fore. In Episode 92, which was one of my favorites of the year, we talked about designing bio-inspired technology. For instance, coatings that represent the sharkskin to repel water that can be put in any hydrophobic area to keep water off is one example. We discussed inventions like that, pulling from nature and how biology really is starting to be the tech area that’s exploding with both ideas and funding, so designing bio-inspired technology.

In Episode 114, we ruminated about how freaking scary it would be if someone was hacking our connected vehicles, hacking cars. There is that video of a hacker group that worked with WIRED magazine to demonstrate how that could be done. If that’s the future, I am slightly worried about that.

In Episode 119, I talked with Scott Stropkay and Bill Hartman of Essential Design on user experience for robotics. Then in Episode 124, our friends at the Personal Genome Project, Madeleine Ball came on the show to talk about Open Humans, which, as you know, is that database for scientific research that is open to research scientists so long as they return data to the people who are participating and to the main Open Humans database.

Then finally, in Episode 125, we talked to our old friend Scott Sullivan, who is doing an awful lot of work in the wearables department. In particular, he’s working on his own smart watch and writing a book on wearables for O’Reilly Media. Scott’s really killing it in the wearables area. Just another example of an emerging technology interview on the show.

I got to say, we’re watching the water recede on emerging technologies and waiting for the wave to come in, I think. All of these, from robotics to food, from genomics to wearables, they’re all still in their early adopter phases and it’s a lot of fun to watch these things start to take shape, because I was in college when the Internet was really beginning to form. I had it from that academic perspective and I didn’t really have the industry perspective the way I do currently.

While it was interesting to see the emerging tech of the time, the Internet come to fruition while I was at Boston University and sitting at my X terminal looking at the Mosaic browser and wondering what the potential was of this information that you could suck down from the Internet, now we’re as a studio involved in various areas like genomics and really starting to see the amount of effort it takes just to get the stuff off the ground. Even though it’s in the early adopter stage, I’d say the amount of time and effort and money that goes into this is astounding. Dirk, I’m sure we’re going to talk about emerging technologies for many years to come.

Now, ever since the iPhone came out basically, now everybody has a smart phone. It’s become this integrated part of our lives. What I’m not clear on is are we in the Newton phase of robotics, genomics, or are we in the early BlackBerry phase. I don’t know.

If you want to follow us outside of the show, you can follow me on Twitter @jonfollett. That’s J-O-N-F-O-L-L-E-T-T, and, of course, the whole show is brought to you by Involution Studios, which you can check out at goinvo.com. That’s G-O-I-N-V-O.com. Dirk?