About this episode

Mike Perrotti discusses his passion for plants and how it relates to design and mental health.

Get your fill of chlorophyll, when Mike Perrotti joins us to talk about his passion for plants. He shares how a therapist's recommendation to add greenery to combat seasonal depression unexpectedly spiraled into a tropical obsession. Mike describes how he catches himself coveting rare expensive plants and consciously redirects back to the meditative joy of caregiving and cultivation. He also reveals how managing a diverse collection in a low-light apartment requires the same constraint-driven creative thinking as design. Guest Bio Mike Perrotti (he/him) is a Product Designer at Datadog living in Brooklyn with an assortment of plants and reptiles, a cat, and a loving partner who tolerates it all. He spends his weekends in his lush greenhouse by day and on dark, foggy dancefloors by night. Before moving to New York in 2012, he studied art in Philadelphia, then fell sideways into UI design and frontend development. He later went on to become a major contributor to various design systems, including GitHub's Primer. Along the way he developed a pattern of picking up hobbies and going completely and shamelessly overboard with them. His houseplant hobby snuck up on him and (predictably)…

People in this episode

Host: Guy Segal

Guest: Mike Perrotti

Topics covered

• plants
• design
• mental health
• hobbies
• caregiving

Keywords

• plants
• seasonal depression
• tropical obsession
• caregiving
• design systems

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Datadog

Books & works: GitHub's Primer

Places: Brooklyn, Philadelphia

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