Designer Profiles: Dalila Szostak
Meet Dalila Szostak. She’s a UX researcher at Jigsaw, an Alphabet company.
Briefly describe your career path, including the reasons behind job changes and shifts.
My story is surrounded by different continents, languages, foods and — inevitably — designs. I was born in Israel, grew up in Argentina and studied both in the US and The Netherlands. Today, I direct a team of user experience researchers at Jigsaw, a small Alphabet company that creates products to keep people on the internet safe from digital conflicts. Like many of my UX peers, my path into design has been anything but straightforward.
My first hands-on encounter with design came in college after deciding to start a small company representing international fashion creators in the wholesale industry. I traveled the whole country attending trade shows and dealing with all sorts of clients, from small boutiques to large corporations in person, but a lot of the interactions were already starting to happen online. In order to keep up, I learned on my own how to create and maintain an e-commerce store. Soon I was creating “banners” for some of my clients and friends (including some fancy animated ones!) to help them promote their brands and stores. I knew then that there was something about design that I was naturally drawn to. An advisor at my university suggested looking into Human Factors and it felt like a perfect fit: a degree combining engineering, psychology and design.
Today I don’t make "cool" banners anymore, I don’t spend days in a flight simulator studying simulation sickness, and I am not designing navigation devices or prototyping self driving cars but I still wake up every day feeling like I have the most exciting job in the world.
What are the challenges that the design field faces today?
“I imagine our current situation will cause future generations to shudder at the thoughtlessness in the way in which we today fill our homes, our cities and our landscape with a chaos of assorted junk.” said Dieter Rams, when he visited NYC in 1976. Today, Dieter is asking "Has anyone been listening?" and frankly, I don't know… Sometimes I get down thinking that we, as designers, are contributing to more problems than solutions. In order to mitigate that feeling, I challenge myself to find ways for my work to contribute to creating paths for people to understand each other and technology in new ways. I find that in our work we have to be intentional and make an effort to ensure we do good. Copying patterns that could be misused is too easy and so is cutting corners such as ignoring digital security, not investing in really understanding the people we are trying to design for and the "unhappy path" of how our work could affect people, etc.
What advice would you give someone starting out in their career today?
Something you can start using today is a challenge a wonderful designer gave me early on in my career: in every design interaction, even in meetings that you run, challenge yourself to listen more than what you speak. Our work is to be connectors and translators so most of our work should be listening, even to things not said.
What’s one thing every designer should know?
You design for people, not users. Some people might become users of the product you are designing, but only if you do a good job!
What’s the most annoying design debate out there? You have the last word; what’s your take?
"Technology first, invention second, needs last." Don Norman, 2009. [drop the mic] My take is that when I grow up I want to be like Norman.
What do you think design will be focused on in ten years?
Finding ways to incorporate back humanity into our designs: the imperfect, annoying, wasteful, biased, sometimes predictable and emotional side that is slowly being removed from our world today.
Who or what influenced you to become a designer?
My dad has inspired me to be curious and inventive and I continue to draw upon those skills in all my work.
What’s the most inspirational thing you've seen / read / heard recently?
A talk about Colonialism in design at the Interaction Latin America 2019 conference in Medellin, Colombia.
What’s your favorite NYC bagel spot?
Ehm, I will go with cake, and it's Harbs.
