We built this city, or rather Odette Jansen did, as she joins us to explore her deep love of city-building games. She talks about being drawn to games with genuine depth and resource management challenges, and a blank canvas that gives her full control without consequences. Games like Cities Skylines or Planet Zoo, where she's logged over 400 hours recreating Disneyland leaf by leaf. Odette also reflects honestly on how being late-diagnosed autistic and ADHD shapes her play style. From the hyperfocus and Excel sheets tracking city resources, to the pure joy of knowing random animal facts at the zoo.

Guest Bio

Odette Jansen (she/her) has spent 15 years in UX. She leads research and content at ING, and she also runs UXR Study (uxrstudy.com) - a training platform for UX researchers, used by over 80,000 professionals worldwide, with courses, templates, and support on everything from research to UX leadership. She's got a BSc in UX and an MEd in talent development and diversity. She's late-diagnosed autistic and ADHD, and that shapes a lot of her work - she's spent a long time looking at how organizations overlook neurodivergent people, and how to build places and leaders that don't.

Links

Odette on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/odett/

UXR Study: https://uxrstudy.com/

Credits

Cover design by Raquel Breternitz.

It's time to lace up when Jarvis Moore joins us to talk about his love for collecting sneakers. He shares how it grew from a childhood longing into a curated collection that serves as his primary form of personal expression, the systematic approach behind his collecting, and how he navigates the hype-driven world of limited collaborations and grail sneakers. Beyond the collecting itself, he reflects on how sneakers function as cultural shorthand, community building, and self-expression, including the Jordans he wore on his wedding day.

Guest Bio

Jarvis Moore (he/him) is a Senior Design Lead for Design Systems at Realtor.com, where his job is to build the infrastructure that makes great design possible at scale. In addition to maintaining and architecting systems, he’s spent his career teaching teams how to think in systems before they ever touch a component. His work spans enterprise design systems, AI tooling, and the harder question most orgs avoid “how do you actually build design culture, not just document it?” He speaks and teaches on all of it, because he’s lived it. He’ll tell you the hardest part of design systems was never the components. It’s the people. It’s always been the people.

Links

Jarvis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jarvismoore1016/

Jarvis on Twitter/X: https://x.com/jmodesigns10

Credits

Cover design by Raquel Breternitz.

Get ready for the beat to drop, when Sam Gordashko joins us to talk about her love of DJing. She traces her journey from recording mixtapes off the radio as a kid to spinning sets at Burning Man. She shares how she learned to embrace imperfection as a recovering perfectionist, breaks down her systematic approach to navigating 50,000 tracks, and explains how DJing puts her into a flow state of constant, calculated risk-taking. Sam also offers practical advice for anyone curious about trying DJing themselves.

Guest Bio

Sam Gordashko (she/her) is a freelance design systems pro with a design tokens obsession based out of Toronto, and she's on a mission to make complex tech feel human. Over the years, Sam has worked with big names like Getty Images, Shutterstock and Intuit, plus plenty of scrappy startups figuring it all out, with most of her career spent as a "Design Team of One" at various tech innovation startups. You might know her as Samantha Gordashko or Sam I am Designs, the public speaker, host of design systems events, and educational content creator focused on design tokens, design-to-development processes, and systems thinking. She's got a knack for turning intimidating technology into approachable, actionable workflows and has built a reputation in the design systems community for making people laugh while sharing her future-friendly design pro tips, real-world workflows, epic fails, and radical honesty about what not to do.

Links

Sam’s website: https://samiam.design/

Sam’s set, Promise Cherry Beach, June 12, 2022: https://soundcloud.com/ilovepromise/aubade-promise-cherry-beach-june-12-2022

Sam’s set, Solar Seance, Club Rapture: https://soundcloud.com/aubade_samiam/ssrapture

Credits

Cover design by Raquel Breternitz.