#collaboration

#collaboration

DJ-Kicks is a series that shaped how I think about DJing and listening. I played the DJ Koze mix an unhealthy number of times, to the point where it basically lives in my DNA now. Those mixes taught me that the best ones aren't about showing off; they're about taking people on a journey. They move, twist and surprise you. They give you goosebumps when you least expect it.

I'll never forget the moment that changed how I think about leadership. It happened during my tenure as president of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, when I learned that one of our longtime supporters, a commercial real estate developer named Irwin, was nearing the end of his life and despairing that his contributions no longer mattered. We brought him to campus to show him otherwise.

For Sam and Avery, the argument didn't begin as an argument. It came up the way it often did, in the margins of an already long day. Avery had stayed late at work again. Sam had handled dinner, emails from the school, and a tense phone call with Avery's mother, who still stumbled over pronouns and pretended not to notice when corrected.

"When a cover in a campaign hits right," said photographer Neil Krug, nominated for The Crux, "it's part of the language and the fabric of what makes a great record a great record."

"We started by asking everyone to collect images regularly. Just spontaneous snapshots as we went. Of everything. Sketches, screens, notes, half thoughts, moments in motion. Over time it became this huge grab bag of elements," Simon says.

When I joined Google ~14 years ago, I thought the job was about writing great code. I was partly right. But the longer I've stayed, the more I've realized that the engineers who thrive aren't necessarily the best programmers - they're the ones who've figured out how to navigate everything around the code: the people, the politics, the alignment, the ambiguity.

The vision was to bring H.R. into a space he hasn't visited in a long time, a sphere he helped create and pioneer,

What design programs rarely prepare students for is how little agency designers often have once they enter professional practice. And this challenge doesn't disappear with experience. When my co-author and I toured our book Designing Tomorrow, the most common question we heard was not what designers should do differently - but how to drive positive change in the face of resistance.

I believe we've yet to fix the challenge around silos, but I have seen a lot of people being unafraid to start again and find their new potential, whether that's in a new workplace, a new country, or even a completely new sector. There's an appetite to learn more, know more, and do more, and honestly I love that. I think the bravery is also in the ability to share.

Most people want powerful long-term relationships at work and at home. But they don't know where to start to build them. Turns out creating trust first unlocks solid relationships. Why go through the hassle of building trust? It pays off. Relationships align people in business and help them work together, says Andres Tapia, founder and president of Chicago-based Andrew Tapia...

From industrial dancehall to leftfield techno to deep, alienating drone made with saxophones, Kevin Richard Martin welcomes the spirit of dub into everything he touches. Across three decades, the physical force of his music has expanded and contracted, but two things remain constant: the pulse of dub, no matter how reduced, and the rumble of the bass. "[The goal] was to make a new form of dub music that I wasn't hearing,"

His frequent allegro cadence accents how deftly he changes direction within verses. "Silent Film," set to mellow chords and a shuffling breakbeat, is casually breathless: "I roll the dough and cook it/Was juggin' cause in a world so cold, you just throw on a hoodie/I see the limit and push it, sneaking over the edge/Made a million off of my grief, none of my people rose from the dead," Mavi raps, subtly pausing-and stretching and compressing words-to keep the meter.

It's a debate I've been dragged into so many times, I've lost track: UX vs. Market Research? Qual vs. Quant? Who owns the insights? Who make the decisions? Who drives the strategy? Who makes the "real" impact? I've been a UX Researcher for over 20 years and my thinking is deeply rooted in building meaningful products and services that solve real human problems... (As opposed to fake problems... you know, the kinds of problems that we invent in order to justify the product we're building-alas, I digress).

Announced just a few days prior to its release, 21 Savage's new album, What Happened to the Streets, documents the subtle maturation of an unblinking Atlanta rapper whose deadpanned threats are a prickly veneer around a grief-stricken survivor mentality. Tracks like the somber "Big Stepper" delve into the pain under the pomp, detailing struggles animating the put-downs we expect to encounter in this work.

Mixed materials, unexpected shapes, and pairings of ideas that sound like they shouldn't work together and yet work very, very well are hallmarks of founder Diaki Suzuki's output. That's why the Japanese-born, New York-based designer has been tapped by companies ranging from Brooks Brothers and Allen Edmonds to Barbour and Uniqlo for countless collaborations over the years.

At the time I had been working in the Technology/Software world for 5 years, after a stint doing Interaction/UI/UX work in agencies. While agency work has a lot of positive aspects to it, I didn't think I was a good fit for it. I found the relationship and ultimately sense of ownership with a solution very fleeting, since in essence the engagement with the client had a time stamp on it, after which you simply started working on something else.

Partying the night before a big exam. Preparing last-minute for a work presentation. Running a 5K in a 10-pound Halloween costume. All are examples of what psychologists call "self-handicapping" - creating obstacles to success to order to bolster or protect one's own reputation. "It's actually very common," said Yang Xiang, a psychology Ph.D. candidate in the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. "There have been many decades of work documenting this behavior."

One of the most pervasive rules of business is compete-to-win or perish. But as more organizations struggle to navigate an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous landscape, some innovative leaders are choosing to collaborate over compete. This is particularly necessary within the organization, where collaboration may be considered beneficial in theory, but in practice, the rules of engagement still revolve around competition: colleagues become rivals over promotion opportunities, recognition, and advancement.

In my opinion, slide decks come with a lot of problems for your product team. Some of the most significant of these include: Hindered collaboration I've never seen a group of people brainstorming and figuring out solutions while working on a slide deck. Most people associate slide decks with a "presentation," and these expectations guide their behavior, causing them to act like "I'm here to listen." It's really hard to get people out of "listener" mode when presenting.

I've always imagined design and engineering as two rails on the same track. They run in parallel, supposedly toward the same product, but they rarely sit at the same spot. Design debt on one side, tech debt on the other, shifting priorities somewhere ahead, and the occasional giant "wait what are we building again?" boulder in the middle. This is usually where collaboration breaks:

The projects that Brodie takes on are created with a mix of digital and physical - his work shouts that hands are at work. Lady Gaga is stretched and made viscous for the cover of Mayhem, her sixth solo studio album, for which Brodie provided art direction and design, with creative direction from Mel Roy of mtla studio and Todd Tourso of Iconoclast.

OpenAI is pushing the new group chat feature as a way for people to collaborate at work and school, as well as a way for friends to make decisions on things like dinner destinations, vacations, and the like. Search, image and file uploading, image generation, and voice dictation are all included in group chats with ChatGPT, powered by GPT-5.1 Auto, which automatically shunts requests to the best model (i.e., instant, thinking, or a legacy model for free tier users) for the task.