UX conversations with institutional memory.
Rosenfeld Review Podcast is a practitioner-minded interview show about UX, research, service design, AI, and design operations. Lou Rosenfeld talks with authors, educators, and people in the field about messy organizational realities, shifting careers, and the tools shaping design work.
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Rosenfeld Review Podcast is an interview show for people who work inside UX, product, research, service design, and design operations. Its center of gravity is professional practice: how teams learn, how organizations adopt methods, how tools change behavior, and how design work survives inside flawed institutions. Lou Rosenfeld leads the conversations with a mix of curiosity, dry humor, and field memory. He knows the books, conferences, arguments, and terminology, but the show is most useful when it presses beyond terminology into what actually happens at scale.
Recent episodes show that range clearly. Jeff Gothelf talks through why OKRs, Agile, and related frameworks fail when organizations copy the ritual but skip the learning. Jen van der Meer discusses design careers, systems transformation, job titles, AI, and the widening distance between hiring labels and real work. Kate Towsey brings research operations into a future where repositories, metadata, taxonomies, platforms, and AI all reshape how research knowledge moves. Maria Rosala brings the research repository conversation back to human judgment, scale, and the problem of audiences a researcher may never meet.
The show also makes space for sharper public and political subjects. Dana Chisnell and Christian Crumlish discuss civic design, federal work, DOGE, and the consequences of treating public service as something to break. Chris Noessel’s episode uses assistant technology and AI as a way to ask whether tools can make people smarter or simply offload thought. Bethany Brown connects service design, operations, and AI to frontline work, where abstract strategy meets people doing difficult jobs.
Rosenfeld Review Podcast suits listeners who already care about design’s professional infrastructure. It is not a tips-and-tricks feed. It is more like a record of the field thinking in public, with experienced guests, practical skepticism, and a steady concern for how better systems get built.
Made for: Designed for UX researchers, product designers, service designers, design operations people, educators, and managers who want thoughtful conversations about practice, tools, careers, and organizational change.
What sets it apart: The show pairs Rosenfeld Media’s UX publishing world with candid interviews that treat methods, tools, and career advice as parts of larger systems. It is especially strong on the operational realities behind design work.
Lou Rosenfeld talks with a LOT of brilliant, interesting changemakers in the UX world and beyond. Subscribe to the Rosenfeld Media podcast for a bird's eye view into what shifts UX faces, and how individuals and teams can respond in ways that drive success.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Lou Rosenfeld connects UX practice to the institutional and technological forces changing how design and research work gets done.
Rosenfeld Review treats UX as work shaped by institutions, careers, and changing technology. In one-on-one conversations, Lou Rosenfeld asks guests to connect design practice with the systems around it, then presses past broad diagnoses toward mechanisms, tradeoffs, and possible…
Lou Rosenfeld asks whether your AI assistant is making you stupid, and suddenly your shortcuts feel less clever.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A six-person, 12-week experiment becomes the clearest proof point for scaling change.
Lou Rosenfeld and Jeff Gothelf trace how OKRs, Agile, Lean UX, and product thinking hold up inside a real organization, keeping the focus on what changes when learning and experimentation become part of the work.
A clear look at design careers when titles stop doing their job.
Jen Vandermeer turns a career talk into something wider, tracing how business experience, comparative religion, and work at Parsons School of Design can shape the same habit of reading systems.
A lively systems conversation about research operations, knowledge management, and the AI-shaped future of research work.
Research work becomes the subject of a practical systems conversation on the Rosenfeld Review, as Kate Tousey connects research operations to the way teams organize and retrieve knowledge.
Maria Rosala frames research scale as a practical challenge of keeping useful work alive across an organization.
Research repositories come through as a practical response to a problem many UX research teams know well: the work keeps piling up, yet still has to stay findable, credible, and useful.
A blunt look at civic design work after U.S. DOGE replaced the U.S. Digital Service.
Rosenfeld's conversation with Dana Chisnell and Christian Crumlish follows civic design work inside the federal government after the Trump administration took power and U.S. DOGE replaced the U.S. Digital Service.
A conversation about assistant design that asks whether AI makes people smarter.
Rosenfeld Review keeps its focus on assistant technology and on Chris Nussel's new book, Designing Assistant Technology, AI That Makes Us Smarter.
Bethany Brown and Lou Rosenfeld explore the overlap of service design, operations, and AI.
Bethany Brown, Head of Service Design at Frog North America, and Lou Rosenfeld frame a conversation around the overlap of service design, operations, and AI.
Two product designers talk Figma workflows, button sizing, and AI design tools weekly.
Stockholm hosts James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom interview UX and accessibility experts.
Four design-business owners, including Design Cuts' Tom Ross, talk pricing, agencies, and creative burnout.
Monocle's design team tours museums, furniture studios, and landmark houses each week.
Lou Rosenfeld interviews Steve Portigal about the second edition of his book 'Interviewing Users' and discusses what has changed in user research over the past decade.
Lou Rosenfeld interviews Sahibzada Mayed and Lauren Lin about their upcoming talk on cultivating design ecologies of care, community, and collaboration at the DesignOps Summit.
Lou Rosenfeld interviews Jay Bustamante about the intersection of design operations, AI, and ethics, and his upcoming talk at the Design Ops Summit.
Lou Rosenfeld interviews Jeff Gothelf about why popular methodologies like OKRs and Agile often fail in practice.
Jen Vandermeer says a comparative religion degree had 'deep ROI' because it helped her land a Japan Development Bank interview by discussing U.S.-Japan cultural differences and Buddhist thought.
Lou Rosenfeld talks with Kate Towsey, author of 'Research That Scales' and host of the Cha Cha Club, ahead of her March 12 session on participant recruitment and management tools at the Advancing Research 2026 UXR Tools Summit.
Lou Rosenfeld interviews Maria Rosala, Director of Research at Nielsen Norman Group, ahead of her March 12 session on research repositories at the Advancing Research 2026 UXR Tools Summit.
Lou Rosenfeld interviews Caroline Jarrett about her work on survey research and the upcoming UXR Tools Summit at the Advancing Research Conference.
Christian Crumlish calls the DOGE effort a "data heist" that exfiltrated private government data.
Lou Rosenfeld interviews Chris Nussel about Designing Assistant Technology, the follow-on to Designing Agentive Technology and Make It So.
Bethany Brown says service design must visualize "the messy context" before AI can fix operational errors.
Lou Rosenfeld introduces Jodi Forlizzi, a professor of HCI at Carnegie Mellon with an art background, who will be the closing speaker at the Designing with AI conference.
Neil Barrie discusses how researchers can use a cultural lens to create breakthrough product experiences.