Full Transcript for Bumhan Yu

Warson Okay, okay, I want to get into the main subject matter, so I gave a little bit of it away in the pre show, and then you gave some of it away as well in your own introduction. But will you say what subjects we're going to get into that you have deep expertise in? Bumhan Yu My current LinkedIn profile, title reads, business of design, design of business. I think that gets closer to what I'm getting at. Skipper Chong Warson Which is also, by the way, and this might make its way into a video clip. That's actually the shirt that you're wearing today. Bumhan Yu Yes, I recently got a expensive toy, if you will, heat press machine in my downstairs home office. So this is just literally hot off the press just before this call. Skipper Chong Warson Oh, wow. Custom t shirt, just for the just for the episode. Bumhan Yu Yeah, exactly, exactly. I'm prepared. My design career started out as typical graphic design craft person Bumhan Yu out annual reports, advertising. I started in advertising studio for about four years and then jumped ship to branding agency. Did more of a brand consulting work, less of a hands on craft, more of a identity framework, communication. Skipper Chong Warson Okay. Bumhan Yu And then I shifted to software industries and within which I roamed around in like a motor pdv and financial institutions and stuff. So I've touched upo a few different aspects and areas of design industry. And over time, I've become more interested in things around design, like the business of design, operations of design, relationship building within which design operates, like the processes, decision making, etc. So not that I'm giving up on the craft itself, but broadening the horizon, if you will. So also, over time, I became a dad as well and managing people, designing the rule around the house, forming the human behavior. I've found a lot of parallel between how design teams work and how the household forms. So and you might agree as a designer that making things is easy as a craftsperson or fixing things is easy. Once you understand the problem, you can do it, but doing so with other people is hard, and overseeing other people to approach that problem under a direction is harder, and making it in a business context, making it make monetary sense, is even harder. So I wouldn't claim to be an expert in this matter, but I'm a Constant Learner, so I discovered a few different topics in the past, say, five to 10 years, about business management, people management, design ops. You know how we decide to operate, how to how to set up a protocol within the team, between the teams, which tooling we use, how to quantify some of the things that we present, etc. So again, going back to the beginning of it like so business of design, business. Design of business is sort of what I want to propose. Skipper Chong Warson Yeah, I think that there's a lot in there, and we're going to get to some of those pieces. So let's put a pin in that for now. I want you to step back you talked about one of the surprising aspects of you is that you went to a Foreign Language High School, but you also have a little bit of a family background in academia. You started in academia yourself. Can you tell us, from that perspective, not just broadly, how you're thinking about design today, but how did you even get started? Bumhan Yu So I was born into a family of academics, both of my parents or tenure track professors, they're lifelong career researchers, and all of my uncles and aunts and my moms and dads and friends who frequented visiting our house like they were all in some type of an academic so that's the world that we grew up in. We, as in my sisters and I, and it was just assumed -- Skipper Chong Warson Sisters plural? Bumhan Yu Yes, I have two sisters. Skipper Chong Warson Okay. Bumhan Yu Way before even understanding what graduate school meant, we assumed they were going to go to grad school. You're going to be a professor, so you just pick a topic was sort of an expectation. And luckily for me, I was a good student, as you know, getting good marks, taking standardized tests, that's a skill in and of itself, and I was good at it. So I went to a good school, good high school, good college. So I was in a academic track. I studied linguistics and psychology. Skipper Chong Warson Okay. Bumhan Yu Double majoring, again, like, according to Foreign Language High School linguistics major, there was an extension there, and I thought I was going to be a therapist, so I went to graduate school. I spent a year in psychology graduate school before I dropped out. Skipper Chong Warson Okay. Bumhan Yu What I realized was that I still love the topic of linguistics, and Satre is my bedtime reading, and I just I love the study of psychology, that as a study ofdomain, I just realized that when I was in it, I didn't want to spend my entire lifetime doing this in the academia and but because of my upbringing and my limited exposure to other people, the orld of grown ups, see, I had no figure that I could look up to who was in the business, like industry, on someone else's paycheck, other than ivory towers. So I didn't even realize that there were some possibility out there. So there might be some other things. My mom is a psychiatric nursing professor, so there were some nurses and doctors around, but there was also, like specific institutions, sure. So I decided to call it quit. So I dropped out, but I didn't know what to do, so I just picked up some random jobs, translation, interpretation, media production, just because I could speak English. Skipper Chong Warson And where were you? Were you in Korea at this time? Bumhan Yu So all these things in Korea. So I was born and raised. I spent over a quarter a century in Korea. I had never planned to leave Korea. It was just never my plan. I joined the military because it's mandatory in Korea. So I spent two years in the Army, hating every

minute of it, and after, I thought, I need a break. I was sick and tired of all things Korean and all this academia. Skipper Chong Warson Yeah. Bumhan Yu Also in like, desperate search of something else other than that what I was doing, and it occurred to me that, hey, I've been making things all along. Bumhan Yu Can you give us an example of what making a thing is for you? In that time? Bumhan Yu I didn't have the word to describe how I thought or how I operate. But looking back, I think people say there are different types of brain wiring, right? So I I tend to think spatially and visually. So I think, for me, thinking means schematics, 2d, 3d, projection diagram, some spatial drawing in the head before I start putting words into a sentence, like forming a linguistic form. I didn't really know that I just thought that everybody else was doing that, and it came also as a shock when I first heard one of my colleagues saying she thinks in words. She literally hears sentences in her ears like That was shocking to me that it never happens to me, quite naturally studying, as a young child, I started drawing, crafting, building Lego blocks and understanding of things and more visually. So ever since I was in the grade school, until, up until, I mean today, all the school systems, all of my textbooks and notes have lots of doodles and drawings. Some are esoteric flow charts, schematics and others, more of a doodle of my classmates around me I see because without making physical shapes, I can't really think through so it came the craft. Craftsmanship in general came rather naturally. It just -- Skipper Chong Warson Sounds like it came in the form of something visual for you that was different than the classmate that you described, who thought of concepts in sentences, whereas you think of things far more visually. Bumhan Yu Yes, yeah, I think that's correct. So it just that it didn't dawn on me until much later in life that I could actually pursue a career making things, because there was never a possibility within the household, like looking around people, reading, writing, researching, lecturing, sure, that was just the expectation. Oh, the grown ups do that. Skipper Chong Warson Yeah. Bumhan Yu So and making things physical things, or drawing or giving a visual shape of someone else's thoughts, came naturally to me, but I just thought much of it, right? Skipper Chong Warson Yeah. Bumhan Yu It was sort of a Ugly Duckling situation, and I was seen as an oddball, like, why are you doodling all this stuff? Like, a few months before my discharge from the army, I discovered the world of design, like, by accident. I was on a weekend leave. I was browsing books magazines at a bookstore, first time discovering some, like, design magazines in Korea. And, oh, people do this, like, and I started talking to a couple of my friends who were actually in design school at the time, and okay, maybe I can give it a go. Skipper Chong Warson Right. Bumhan Yu But I wasn't convinced that I could do this. Over the course of 20 something years, I was doing something else, like studying and reading books. So when I first decided to come to New York. It was official. The front to my parents was that I'm going to find my way back into psychology. Skipper Chong Warson Okay. Bumhan Yu Which I did, actually. Skipper Chong Warson Yeah so there was a story. Bumhan Yu There was more of an official excuse. So to be fair, though, I signed up for on a training program. It was called International trauma stories program, which I believe is still running. Skipper Chong Warson Okay. Bumhan Yu It was an interesting program. It was a multi disciplinary training program that specifically, specifically deals with trauma victims, trauma survivors as a society, as a community. So it's a collaboration between psychiatrists, nurses, journalists, policy makers, lawyers, doctors, just social workers are all together. How do we approach this whole big phenomenon of traumatic experience, and how do we support it better? Skipper Chong Warson Sure. Bumhan Yu And it was fascinating subject, but also very depressing and traumatizing, if you will. So I found this rather crappy trade school in Manhattan. It was not a design school. It was a specialized charter school to produce skilled assistants, executive assistants, and because it was a graphic design fad at the time, I guess they they started to offer this graphic design program, two year associate program. So I got in and through that, I got an internship. Through that, I got a job. Skipper Chong Warson Okay. Bumhan Yu So what was initially thought of as a temporary stay ended up becoming permanent squatting. So it's been 17 years since I came here. Skipper Chong Warson Okay. Bumhan Yu I have two kids, two cars, mortgages, stuff, you know, marriage, I'm not going anywhere at this point. So that that's -- Skipper Chong Warson You signed up for the full deal. Bumhan Yu Now, there's no pulling back, right? So, right. People ask me, Do you feel it was a waste of time, like, so my first design job was when I was 29 going up 30, right? Skipper Chong Warson Okay. Bumhan Yu And -- Skipper Chong Warson Later than some, earlier than others, but yeah. Bumhan Yu Yeah, yeah, there. It's not new today. Like, there's a lot of career switchers these days. People ask me, so would you consider that a waste of time? Like, Would you have preferred to go to art school, design school from the get go? Sure, but not necessarily. I think one of my biggest strength, if not the biggest strength that I have as a designer, is that I come from a non design background. Yeah. So one of the first jobs that I was assigned to at the ad agency was Annual Report designing, okay, and it naturally contains a lot of numbers, yeah, and esoteric data, charts and graphs like business context and things, although I was not trained in business, understanding

numbers, statistics, visualizing it, explaining it, was part of my training as well. So rather than just making taking the table and colorizing and making it pretty, I could actually try to understand what's what is trying to convey and then translate it visually. So that has always been my strength as a designer. So even my current job, it's one of my primary role to define shapes of data visualization, and also so the subject matters themselves. I studied linguistics, psychology, so study of language, study of communication, human mind and behavior and design, especially when I was in branding, it is all about making connections authentic human experience and how to communicate that. How do we get to the bottom of the identity of an entity and make make it resonate with other people? Skipper Chong Warson Sure. Bumhan Yu So, although I'm not using, like day to day textbook lingo and concept constructs from the my linguistics ears, yeah, there are certain things that inform how I think about things and approach problems. Skipper Chong Warson Yeah, from a holistic perspective, because thinking about linguistics, you're also at least trilingual, if not speaking more languages than that, but the fact that you hav an innate skill of taking some concept in your head and translating it, whether It's English, Korean or German, and being able to because when you're communicating with someone, as you and I are talking on this right, I'm watching you. You're watching me. You know, is there a comprehension that's happening if I sort of screw up my face in a very specific way, you might reframe the thing that you're talking about. So there's lots of subtextual information that's being passed back and forth between us, even in this conversation, and then applying to that, some idea of maybe some of the pieces from your psychology background, which is how people perceive things. And so there's this other layer, and I think that all goes into this notion of, as you said, you know, on some level, design is all about taking an idea in either your head or a group's head and visualizing it in a way that the communication is clear, right? That's part of the problem is trying to make sure that we're communicating this idea. And I feel like all of this boils into your -- it sounds like the foundation of your work as a designer. I want to get back to this idea of this broader kind of working in the very tangible tactical like I'm going to lay out annual report. You know, there's text, there are pull quotes, there are maybe charts and figures. Maybe there's some photography or other kind of imagery that's used to help tell that story. Consistency of design, like some of those things, what's the grid? What's the gutter? What are all of those physical pieces of designing to then moving to what you talked about as being much more broad in terms of the work that you do. So you mentioned this idea of, like, working with other business folks. So whether those are product people or technology people or executives, a mixture of all of those, you know. So this idea of cross functional work and design ops, like, how do these kind of play into the way that you work today because you have a full time role in which you operate as a designer. What does your world look like at DoubleVerify, right now? Bumhan Yu So I was hired. My first title here was senior product designer. Skipper Chong Warson Okay. Bumhan Yu And my job description was primarily about helping things get released. Skipper Chong Warson Okay. Bumhan Yu But there is a touch of a vague clause where you help the team grow and operate and things right. Skipper Chong Warson Sure. Bumhan Yu And it's about that period of time, like four years ago, three years ago, that I discovered the term design ops, the short put design operations. And I took a couple trainings and started reading some books and listening to podcasts. And it was some of the things that I've been doing just out of necessity, like just just to keep the team rolling, process moving, sure or other team members were sharing the responsibilities of -- Skipper Chong Warson Yeah. Bumhan Yu And, oh, I didn't realize that this was actually a discipline that people are dedicating that, you know, career into. And my new title as of today is group lead, product design. Skipper Chong Warson Okay Bumhan Yu I don't know what that means exactly. There's not a big group here, Skipper Chong Warson Right. Going back to nomenclature. Bumhan Yu So on the tactical technical side, I maintain the design systems, defining the colors and tokens and theming, and creating documentation annotation on the design system itself, and working close with the front end engineers help oversee the production of it and governance of between code and design. Skipper Chong Warson Yeah. Bumhan Yu And also, I own a few feature areas of the software that we release, some dashboards and things see because we are a small team in a cross functional organization. Being good in the craft alone doesn't really get you so far. So being a super expert in Figma, understanding all the UX best practices, you know, understanding the trends and whatnot, it doesn't help you communicate your idea to the product manager, product owner, selling the feature, or when you're done an impeccable job of wrapping up the Figma file. Like, how do you annotate that? How you communicate that design decision, design intention to the engineers? Like, there's an aspect beyond craft, design craft, that you need to have to function well in a multi disciplinary operation. And that kind of problems interest more than, say, craft of design itself these days. So as you mature as a designer, as you spend more time in in the world of design, you will get to see the bigger picture that you were not able to see. And the first two, three years as a designer in advertising studio, I was just so happy and excited to be doing things like

anything that's given to me, I'll be happy. I'll just crank it out. And Madison Avenue is notorious for its killing work schedule, like I would spend 15-16 hour shift for six days per week and six days on demand so I didn't have light and I didn't have a complaint at that time, I was almost proud of it. And overworking, killing myself, burning myself out, and consuming all things that there is to consume, like design theory, design concepts, reading about design, you know, following through -- Skipper Chong Warson Living and breathing design, yeah. Bumhan Yu And then that steam runs out pretty quickly. I was frustrated, like, I'm getting better at my craft, and I'm understanding the business better, sure all the directives that are given to me, sometimes, doesn't really make sense, but there is no way for me to contribute back to that thought process, because I'm the executing set of hands. And sometimes, when I see some clunky operation between pre-press mechanical versus this art director from 18th floor, I think I can help it move better, but there is not my place. So over time, I got more interested in solving different types of problem that is adjacent to design, rather than focusing on design itself. Skipper Chong Warson Okay. Bumhan Yu So what I like about my current job at DoubleVerify is that there's a lot of growing pains. The design discipline in this company is relatively new, other than marketing and branding design, the product design department didn't really exist. Just until my director was hired, okay, three years ago. Skipper Chong Warson Okay. Bumhan Yu So we are building the team. We are starting to get the hang of how we work together. So the company is used to working running without this in house design team. So there's a innate expectation, like, what design should be, right? Skipper Chong Warson And it sounds like one of the things that you're articulating, and I'm actually borrowing this from a previous conversation that you and I had around this idea of lowercase d design and capital D design. And there are two sort of different levels. Do you want to articulate this concept in terms of maybe some of what you just talked about in your current work? Bumhan Yu Here's a quick story. So like seven years ago, when I was working at a branding agency, we client headquartered in Paris, so we needed to do a workshop there. So the whole team went to visit the Paris office and one of my aunts lived there in France, so I visited her nice little dinner at her house. And the last time I saw like had seen her before. That was like, seven years prior at the time I was a graduate school student in psychology Skipper Chong Warson Right. Bumhan Yu So she just casually asked, Oh, so what are you doing in Paris? What are you doing in New York? And I said, Oh, I'm in design. And she goes, like, shocked, are you in fashion? And design meant for her? Skipper Chong Warson Yeah. Bumhan Yu Exactly. So I had -- Skipper

Chong Warson Especially New York, you're in New York, you're coming to Paris. Surely, it's your fashion design. Bumhan Yu Exactly, exactly. So design is one of those words that can mean many things to different people, and a lot of people have, like, preconceived concept of what design is or design should be. And fashion design, capital F, capital D, has this very specific expectation and skill set that's required. Game design, lighting design, graphic design, identity design, UX design, so all this isolated expertise, like, like, industry domains that to me seems very much well defined, well scoped, capital, D design, like, when you say I'm an architectural designer, versus I'm a fashion designer or I'm a packaging designer, there's a very clearly defined job description there. You have to have XYZ credentials, licenses and certain skill sets to be functioning in that role. Versus, say, lowercase d design as like, a common verb, right? Like, what do you mean by design? Like, so these days, the definition of design in the industry seems to expand every day. So when I was -- Skipper Chong Warson Depending on who's talking about it. Yep. Bumhan Yu Yeah. And then also what used to be a non design role/job is now considered a design role/job. So business consultancy, business design, like learning, development, curriculum, design, content strategy, content design, and which is not a bad thing, per se, right? So when I mentor, when I when I work in a mentorship situation with fledgling designers in boot camp, one of my icebreaker questions for them in the first session is, what do you think design is? Well, what's the synonym of a design? And there's normally two camps. More commonly, maybe 60/40, the majority would say, decorate, beautify, something that's more of a superficial level, like making it free mix. Skipper Chong Warson Yeah. Bumhan Yu The aesthetics portion and more on the minority, but not too minority goes as synonym architect, plan, schematics, right? I think that that seems to me more of a essence of design as a lower case d like, given any type of a challenge or problem, define the problem and trying to come out with the solution. That's the design process? Skipper Chong Warson Right. Bumhan Yu So, whether the medium, end result is a printed substrate or 3d surface. Skipper Chong Warson Yeah. Bumhan Yu Or software interface, that's secondary -- Skipper Chong Warson Whatever the medium, yeah. Bumhan Yu Right. Like, I don't know how well resonate this idea of capital D and lowercase d design would be to people. Skipper Chong Warson Yeah. Bumhan Yu But I think like the whole concept of design thinking that IDEO proposed all those years ago, Tim Brown -- Skipper Chong Warson Stanford d.school as well. Bumhan Yu Yeah, right, in the same vein, right? So, so all the trainings and mental models and skill sets we own. As a designer, our own training and expertise can be applied in not just design capital D,

but anywhere else like give us any problem, we're going to help you solve it some of my peers from my early career, some are in managerial role. Skipper Chong Warson Sure. Bumhan Yu Just not really touching anything graphic files. And the others are still in IC mode, like principle design and whatnot. And if I were to pick between the two. I'm more interested in the former, sure, but then again, I don't want to be a full time manager, so I would still like to think of myself as a designer, but my deliverables tend to be less visual, less tangible, and more of an agreement. This is how we make decision. This how we work together. This a diagram. This the math of the process, or this is how we work together. This is where we want to grow in, like organizational design or team design, process design. Skipper Chong Warson That's a that's a really interesting philosophical point, which is when you so you talked about how at DoubleVerify you're currently on the people manager track, the manager track -- that idea of that title, occupation, being designer. Does that imply that you are a person who works inside the design, like, works on the artifacts, works on the like, sometimes people say, I'm a hands on keyboard designer. To say that, like, I'm a designer who actually works on things, versus a designer who manages or who works on the operations or the workflow or the 10,000 foot view, and maybe as a first question, maybe what I'll do for you B is reflect back to you this idea of that icebreaker question that you ask some of your mentees. What are synonyms for you for design? Bumhan Yu I think it's mostly for me one word would be like architect or schematic or plan, or as a phrase of a concept, understand and explore, or something like that. Skipper Chong Warson Well, that kind of aligns with, like some of the things around that idea of the Double Diamond, we'll leave a link to this in the show notes, so that way people can find it. But that idea of having part of it that diverge, converge, right, that zoom -- zoom out, zoom in approach, but the four phases being discovering, defining, developing and delivering. And it sounds like for you, whether you're thinking about the way that your household operates just on a day to day, sort of like schedule, like, what are the rhythms, what are the things that you do? But then also thinking about this from your work perspective, like, how do you uncover that context, and then how do you articulate it? And then how do you make something, try something out, and then you know, and then continue to iterate on it. Bumhan Yu Yeah. Skipper Chong Warson I am in a point where I'm beginning to wonder about the efficacy of design thinking because, and maybe it's because I've heard it said too many times, and it's becoming a little bit of a stereotype, a little bit of a catch phrase, and I'm beginning to wonder if this kind of like efficiency based framework to get at something more creative, something more

innovative, something more fill in your blank. I'm beginning to wonder if that actually works. Bumhan Yu Yeah, design thinking, to me, seems almost like a dirty word, like not a dirty word. It's like you said, it's overused. It's totally sometimes out of context, right? And it's way too commoditized, for sure. So when the term was coined, maybe 20 something years ago, it was a novel concept. So designers who were used, who used to be considered as just trade people, crafts people now understand. So now they propose they will, under apply this thinking into more of a broader scope of business and social aspects and whatnot. That's new and and very quickly, people discovered that there's a business in it. Skipper Chong Warson Right. Bumhan Yu So they started selling courses, workshops, certificates, and it becomes more like a snake oil. So I took three hour, maybe, like a full day, eight hour course at this so and so University and now I'm a certified design thinking facilitator -- Bumhan Yu A design thinker. Bumhan Yu That's very cringe worthy. Skipper Chong Warson Right. Bumhan Yu And in a way, that's going the opposite direction which design thinking or Agile manifesto wanted to go for, like less of a strict processes, you know, check boxes to go against. Skipper Chong Warson Right. Bumhan Yu I think, in spirit, I agree, like we want to diverge before we start converging. Let's -- before we jump into problem solving mode -- let's look at the problem long and hard enough so that we can understand this better. Maybe this is not the right problem to solve like so in philosophy, in principle, I agree with that. Like, so the Double Diamond must be -- Skipper Chong Warson 100%. Bumhan Yu The two diamonds. Let's before we get into the problem solving diamond, let's get into problem understanding and before that let's get into the problem defining or definition diamond. Like, I think the problem that I see is this is becoming more prescriptive. This flow chart, like, I'm sure you have seen this double diamond, each containing, like, 1000 different segments, like this diamond. Skipper Chong Warson Right. Bumhan Yu That's not the purpose. Skipper Chong Warson That's right. It's not a map. Bumhan Yu Exactly, exactly. If it's a map, it's more of a directional pointer, not, not the whole -- Skipper Chong Warson Like you said, understand something before you start formulating a solution Bumhan Yu That's the big conundrum. Like, so I'm a big Bruce Lee fan, like, you know, like many of us from this generation. Skipper Chong Warson Sure. Bumhan Yu So he studied, practice, trained, learned many different kinds of martial arts from all over the world, and trying to get the essence of each discipline and build his own right. So his old spiel was, don't stick to the dogma. Anything work that works it, absorb it. Don't treat it as a religion, you know. Skipper Chong Warson Yeah. Bumhan Yu Take what you need, take what you want, and make it yours like. And he came up with his own, like jeet kune do, his own style, and his approach to his martial art was that I'm not gonna follow the strict training routines or dogmatic approaches of any of that. I'm gonna just follow my own instinct. And that makes it impossible to maintain his school of martial arts, like, because jeet kune do is a formless art, it's not strict say okinawan, this family of karate, taekwondo, hapkido, like, whatever. They have their own training regimen. And the way of kicking, way of punching -- it doesn't really have that, so it's Bruce Lee's own art, right? And in some ways, let's say, the forefathers of design thinking and Agile Manifesto found out certain ways that work for them, perhaps like that, those who coined the term design thinking were themselves well versed in traditional design training and thinking for sure there was a lot more context that they had, yep, because of that old school design training and trade and all this experience, they could come to that conclusion of applying this to other contexts, like same with Agile Manifesto. They were seasoned engineers and because, and also Bruce Lee, he himself was like a champion of this martial art, right? But because we are now commoditizing or democratizing this once unique, esoteric domain of design, engineering, martial arts. Skipper Chong Warson Sure. Bumhan Yu People like, yes, there's a benefit of lowering the barrier to entry. Skipper Chong Warson Yep. Bumhan Yu But there's a misconception of the newcomers just because they wrote a paper about design thinking. Oh, now I understand design Skipper Chong Warson Right, right. And that's just one approach. Bumhan Yu So a few months ago, I was in one of the corporate training sessions that was given by HR learning department, and one segment was design thinking, design training, spresented by a non designer, like, all respect to that person, like, I'm not shaming or defaming that person. But I found it comical as the designer who have practiced design for almost two decades, right sitting in this lecture where an HR person reading off of a script with this design thing diagram, Double Diamond -- I'm sure that that person didn't even design those deck like this. Got it from somewhere, right? Skipper Chong Warson Right. Bumhan Yu That's part of my day to day struggle as well. On the design discipline is new in this company, in DoubleVerify, the people here, the product managers and engineers and the business leaders in general, have not -- they don't know how to work with design. So the design that they know of is they will come to the conclusion they understand the problem. They will think about the market and market and whatnot, and they will draw out some concepts and hand over to designers, and they will execute it like that's the common operation that they are used to, not to fault their own like. But now it's our responsibility that, now that we, the design team,

is formed, it's our responsibility to show them different ways, maybe perhaps better ways. So before you jump into proposing solutions, maybe we need to look at the problem more deeply, more thoroughly. But that in itself, is an uphill battle like so they're not used people are not used to including designers in that phase. And on one hand, I find tools like design thinking, the double diamond diagrams or methodologies, journey mapping, affinity map, those help getting your foot in the door. So see all these tools that I have right. On the other hand, they're not always necessary either. Skipper Chong Warson Sure. And then it's about establishing credibility. And here's something that many other people use, right? You're almost borrowing authenticity. Here's a framework that many other businesses use, some just like our business, to frame around. It's like a like a mold in which we can work around in this way. And it also sounds like it's a yes and approach to say we got your creative brief, or your product requirements or business requirements, whatever they are, and we made something that looks like this, and we also went out and tested it. So there are lots of different ways that I think that you can validate. Another thing that you're that you're saying in this example is that change is hard, that to do something different is a very hard thing to do. And the fact that there was an HR professional talking about design thinking tells me a little bit about how far it's come. It's out of the design camp. It's out in the world. And once that becomes a thing in the world, people can kind of do whatever they want with it. Bumhan Yu True, true. Skipper Chong Warson I want to throw one more lens on onto here, because you know, as part of your identity, I want to talk about how your work as a coder, as a as a developer, how does that play into your worldview as a designer? Because you talked about how very early on you were and are very visual in the way that you think about things. How does being a designer who codes? How does that fit into your worldview as a designer. Bumhan Yu More immediately and directly. So working for a enterprise software company, that comes in very handy if, even while designing or planning things out, if I were to build it, I would structure it this way. So I have this mental model of back end data structure like this. This is coming from where this is one bucket, like how we want to architect the invisible part that informs the visible part, so that makes it move, in my mind, more effectively, yeah, with less chance of pushback from the engineers, right? So that translates directly to good designer, engineer relationship like and then have a better explanation of why I designed it in such a way that it behaves like that. And then they would we could have it have an argument more high level though, like we interact with machines everywhere. Skipper Chong Warson Sure. Bumhan Yu Some things are even invisible, but we are living in the mechanical processes that is machine and so from the touch devices in the pocket to TV and computer keyboard and elevator whatnot, and there is some kind of logic that's governing that operation, however, lower level Machine language that is written in, right? There's some basic machine, like algorithm or decision tree behind that machine, and that operation of it like I was introduced to the computer when I was in third grade, or eight bit computer, you know? Back in the day the basic programming or whatnot, there was the entry to the world of machine, right? Skipper Chong Warson Mm. Bumhan Yu It helps me be a better problem solver, like isolating the problem from all these potential solutions. Let's say my son comes in saying, the light doesn't turn on. What's the problem? Is it the bulb out? Is it the power? I would short circuit it like I can isolate some of the some of the problems. Is this power plug works? Is is this machine broken? Can I swap out two different decisions so looking at the problem more systematically, eliminating some of the options, until I get to the core of the problem and isolate the problem and then tackle the problem in isolation. That's that's like a debugging 101, and that helps me even understand people dynamic as well, like hand in hand with the psychology training. When somebody says, I I can't stand this guy. Skipper Chong Warson Right. Bumhan Yu What is it? Is it sense of humor? Is it some kind of deliverable? Was there a conflict? Was this person just in a bad mood? Skipper Chong Warson So I think one of the things that I hear you saying is that it's not just even about a technical expertise, although you being able to code, even if you don't do that every day now, still informs the work that you do, right in the same way that studying linguistics, studying psychology, those things inform your work as a designer. So it almost becomes a foundational base for how you work, and maybe even your the way in which you exercise empathy. So I think that there's, there's a much bigger piece here around how these things play out and and I want to pull out another thing that you just said around really trying to figure out, in terms of a diagnosis, what is the why -- you talked about a household example, the light doesn't work in one part of your house, but I think that can be applied as well to a software problem. People are having trouble logging into the system. Why? Like, what is so that's a very tactical why. But then I think there's another version of that, whether you follow the five whys framework, or you follow some other kind of diagnosis where you get to the root cause, you propose some sort of solution to mitigate it, and then you go try it out like that sounds like at its core, kind of the process of problem solving, and maybe even for some people, the process of design. Bumhan Yu Yeah, I think the way describe it makes a lot of sense. I agree with it, yeah. But then

again, the way you ended the question, like, it depends also, like -- Skipper Chong Warson I like how you're playing both sides. Bumhan Yu Like, what is, what is a good design? It's an open ended question which cannot really be answered, right? What's a good process? Skipper Chong Warson Right. Bumhan Yu And recently, I bought this poster -- I'm going to send you a link to. Relatively well known Eames company design process diagram. Skipper Chong Warson This is cool. I don't think I've ever seen this. Bumhan Yu A very organic shape diagram or venn diagram of, so this is what the market wants. This is what the industry needs. This is the budget that -- and it's all shape shifting -- and the designer's job is to define the biggest overlap of all these areas and try to make it work. I'm butchering this whole process, but less mechanical and linear than, say, common Double Diamond design thinking, you know, framework. Skipper Chong Warson Yeah, yeah. Bumhan Yu And I thought a lot about what you said about whole effectiveness driven design thinking processes, or the teamwork and one of the really visceral challenges that we have a design team at the DoubleVerify is that we have a very different scopes of project like one is like a greenfield project. We have a very loosely defined big domain we need to tackle. We need to go from a high level understanding of defining the problem longer term, that will probably entail a lot of rounds of brainstorming and research and whatnot. Skipper Chong Warson Sure. Bumhan Yu And the other, on the other end of spectrum is maintenance of the existing feature. Let's add this new button here. We have a new market segmentation. We need to tweak this UI a little bit. And in this latter case, we don't have to have all these exercises, workshops and brainstorms or whatever. That tends to be more -- Skipper Chong Warson Very tactical, right. Bumhan Yu When the design team needs to propose a new working processes or the cadence of meeting. It's really hard, if not impossible, to define one size fits all framework that could sort both, right? I don't know. I don't really have an answer I guess. Skipper Chong Warson (Laughs) It's okay to not have an answer, but I do think that this is a really sticky area, which is design thinking doesn't apply to everything. You know, sometimes there's just a very transactional, tactical piece of work that needs to get done. And we don't necessarily need to have a collaborative session if one of the problems is, you know, we just need to make a couple of changes on the page, and whether that's something that's AB tested or goes through some kind of due diligence to make sure that this is the right change to make, it may not require the entire weight of a design thinking process, or this Eames process that you've shared with me, or even something that I've been thinking about a lot more, which is the design squiggle. Do you know this from Damian Newman? Bumhan Yu

Oh yeah, the squiggle line -- Skipper Chong Warson The squiggle that starts like crazy over here, and then kind of evens out. I dropped a link to it in our chat, and we'll share it in the show notes as well. But that idea of when you first start something, it's really complicated and hairy, and you have to move past moving from left to right. Some people have assigned different phases or segments to this. I think it goes back to the thing that you said Bumhan around how I don't think there's a one size fits all to the way that we approach some of these challenges and problems? Bumhan Yu Yeah, that's kind of what I intended when at the entry intro of this call, like, solving problems is easy, making things is easy, but doing it with other people like under a certain surface, is hard. Skipper Chong Warson Yep. Bumhan Yu Like, I learned how to talk about design with sophisticated vocabulary in a button down, way like that. That's what I learned, like and or design theory and whatever. Skipper Chong Warson Yeah. Bumhan Yu But that never really helped me in the studio. Skipper Chong Warson Yeah. Bumhan Yu Like working with other people, yeah, and like that makes it challenging and also like exciting. It's a problem worth tackling, right, say, building a well designed typographic poster, you know, neat column, grid, you know, Swiss International style. That' s a challenge. It's a fun challenge. Skipper Chong Warson Sure. Bumhan Yu But that's been done before. Skipper Chong Warson Lots of examples of that. Bumhan Yu Exactly, just Google that and you have a bunch of it, like you could even askChatGPT or GenAI to build something like that. Skipper Chong Warson That's right. Bumhan Yu But people's problems, human psyche behind it, that's never the same. Skipper Chong Warson Yeah, it's complicated. It's complicated. And I think a lot of times, we as designers and we as humans in the world don't know what success looks like. So even if we get there, even if we sort of, like, push through the process, we have a very high bar for what good looks like. So I think we kind of keep pushing and keep pushing which is, which is good. Because, you know, we kind of keep working, we we iterate, we work that muscle. But at the same time, I think sometimes it's good to reflect and look back and be a little bit more philosophical. I think you need both. You need the doing and you need the higher level. Bumhan Yu Yeah, yeah. Skipper Chong Warson So Bumhan, we've explored quite a lot of ground in our general conversation, but I want to get into our closing questions that we ask of all of our guests, what's a significant lesson that you've learned in your home life or in your work life -- maybe something that you wish you would have learned earlier? Bumhan Yu The lesson that I wish I had learned earlier, very personally to me, bias to action, right? So I tend to overthink a lot, and I've always been a perfectionist. And you know how people say perfection is the enemy of good, right? Bumhan Yu Sure. Bumhan Yu And in fear of missing one little piece or not having perfectly thought this through, I wouldn't even get started like and that -- Skipper Chong Warson I see. Bumhan Yu -- becomes a hurdle. And a lot of looking back like there are a lot of things that I could have done, I would have done that I didn't do. Skipper Chong Warson Sure. Bumhan Yu Just stop overthinking, stop thinking and just get going, get doing. You know would be, would be that. Skipper Chong Warson Yeah, that's fair. What's something that you're excited by right now? Whether it's a book, a show, podcast, movie, something that you might be reading, absorbing, that you're really jazzed by right now. Bumhan Yu Feel like, since my second kid was born, I've been obsessed with this Italian teacher, slash writer slash theoretical physicist, (in an Italian accent) Carlo Rovelli, Carlo Rovelli. Skipper Chong Warson Okay. Bumhan Yu And I've been listening to his audiobook "The Order of Time" on repeat for the past few weeks now, and it's very soothing -- Skipper Chong Warson Oh wow, on repeat? Bumhan Yu It's a very heavy kind of esoteric, mind bending topic of, you know how time works? You know what's time even mean? But something very meditative and soothing about it. And also it's a bonus that it's read by this British actor, Benedict. What his name? Skipper Chong Warson Cumberbatch. Bumhan Yu He has, like, very -- Skipper Chong Warson I just remember that because you said it on in our previous conversation -- Bumhan Yu He has very, like, soothing voice with very elegant British accent and very theatrical delivery of it. So I recommend it. And I just picked up this new book, “How to Take Smart Notes” by Sönke Ahrens. It's it's about like zettelkasten methods and things, and how to take a better note. And -- Skipper Chong Warson Okay. Bumhan Yu The note is only good if you get to use it, if it's just a symmetry of ideas, just big bounds of notebook that's really not useful. So how do you take a useful, practical note, which you can use to think further right? So that's been an interesting to read. Skipper Chong Warson Okay, so if you had an unexpected day off with unlimited resources, all the money that you would want at your disposal. What's one thing that, what's -- how would you spend that day? Bumhan Yu Just one day. Skipper Chong Warson Just one day. Bumhan Yu So I will, this is not so realistic, but it's not realistic premise. Anyways, that's an unrealistic question to begin with. So I will fly a Concord plane to Rome so that I can get there quickly, spend the day in Rome, just roam around in the old town, just getting lost in the city. I don't speak a word of Italian. I kind of missed it as a 20 something year old, I traveled quite a bit in Europe and some parts in Asia, and there's like a touch of anxiety, like being in the foreign land as a foreigner, not

speaking a word of language and not knowing where to go. Like there's a lurking danger, maybe around the corner, but there's an excitement there. Like, I haven't felt that feeling for such a long time, like my life is so predictable, so I want to be in that position again, in in a strange environment. Skipper Chong Warson Is the, is the Carlo Rovelli book informing the Italy part of it? Bumhan Yu Yeah. Like one of his audiobooks was read by him himself, like most of his other audiobooks were read by, for some reason British folks, like, maybe it's an American mindset, like Italian-British. What's the difference? But one of the books was read by him, Seven Lessons of Physics. So it was very exotic. Like, you know, it's Italian accent in English talking about physics. Italy happens to be the first destination in my life ever, like traveling abroad, so I have a nostalgia there, landing in a Roman airport. Skipper Chong Warson B -- what's one thing that you think will be true a year from now? Bumhan Yu A year from now, I think the designers are still working. We're not going to lose our jobs basically to -- Skipper Chong Warson Like to AI, you mean? Bumhan Yu AI. Yeah, we cannot not talk about AI, you know, in the age of AI, and also AI as a whole, as an industry, it's a bold prediction, but predict that they wouldn't have found their breakthrough of their -- Skipper Chong Warson Mm. They will not have found their breakthrough? Bumhan Yu Right, right. So people say, like artificial general intelligence (AGI) is near. You know, it's so close, like Skynet is near. I don't think we're quite there yet. I mean, as a technology, as a research domain, I think it's fascinating. There's revolutionary breakthroughs day after day. Things are changing, but in terms of business and application, in day to day human use -- Skipper Chong Warson Right. Bumhan Yu I'm not quite seeing the real, practical, useful, you know, cases yet. There are some really novel cases. Oh, that's fun. You prompt this AI to do this thing, and it spits out something really nice. But is it feasible? Like, so you're spending, like, trillions of dollars every day to train this thing -- Skipper Chong Warson Yeah. Bumhan Yu And this artificial intelligence. With that money, you can actually raise real human intelligence, invested in the upbringing of the young generation, whatnot. And it seems to me, the whole AI hype seems to be a lot like solutions looking for problems, right? So is it feasible? Is it maintainable? So these whole AI driven search engines and these models, it's hugely expensive to maintain, like, data center and cooling down the machines and whatever. But nobody's paying for that. It's a novelty. So is it feasible business model? I predict that within a year, we may be one step closer to finding it, but, yeah. Skipper Chong Warson Okay. We'll have show notes available all the way through this, but if someone's looking to find out more about you and your work, where can they find you online? Bumhan Yu I have this not so well maintained old personal website called bald.design, B-A-L-D as in no hair up top. Skipper Chong Warson Sure. Bumhan Yu I don't really use social media anymore. I have Instagram account where I post my kids pictures sometimes. That's instagram.com/baadaa/. Skipper Chong Warson Okay. LinkedIn, maybe? Bumhan Yu Oh yeah, LinkedIn, yeah, LinkedIn, profile, LinkedIn might be the most practical way to find me, actually -- linkedin.com/in/bumhan/. Skipper Chong Warson Okay, like, that's the connection. Bumhan Yu Okay, yeah. Skipper Chong Warson Well, Bumhan, I really appreciate you taking time to chat today. Bumhan Yu Yeah, thank you, my pleasure. [Outro music] Skipper Chong Warson And that's it for this episode of the How This Works show. Subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. You can find us online at howthisworks.show, that's four words with no dashes. Until next time, remain ever curious and we’ll talk again soon.