Discussing Design Education with SVA’s Allan Chochinov

Allan Chochinov, Founding Chair of the MFA in Products of Design graduate program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, joins Lou to discuss how his program approaches the education of new designers—from the belief that grades can hamper creativity and risk taking, to the need for his students to learn the art of careful listening. After eight graduating classes, Allan offers surprises and insights about different career trajectories for design students, and clear evidence that career paths are often non-traditional.

Allan Chochinov is a partner of Core77, the design network serving a global community of designers and design enthusiasts since 1995.

A Proactive Approach to Inclusive Design with Zariah Cameron

Zariah Cameron is Co-Director of Community + Research and the founder of AEI – Advocate, Educate, Innovate Black Design. She will be a speaker at October’s DesignOps Summit on streamlining an inclusive design practice.

Many companies and corporations have good intentions when it comes to inclusive design. But too often that’s where things both start and stop. Zariah helps companies operationalize their inclusive design principles and ideals by looking at design from all angles and instilling effective processes.

When exploring ideals of equity and inclusivity, many confuse inclusivity with accessibility. Accessibility is a fine place to start, but it’s just the beginning. Accessibility tends to be passive while inclusivity is active. Inclusive design proactively seeks out the marginalized, the underserved, and minority groups. It doesn’t make assumptions but seeks input, feedback, and follow-through.

For many companies, the most effective way to pursue inclusive design is to work with grassroots organizations. Partnering with such organizations provides corporations access to a diverse pool of participants. It’s a process of co-creation and involves a long-haul-relationship mentality.

Zariah mentions a variety of organizations that design teams could partner with to access diverse talent:
Creative Reaction Lab
Pause and Effect
Aroko Cooperative – seeking equity, liberation, community healing, and ecocentricy

What you’ll learn from this episode:
About Zariah’s talk at the upcoming October 2024 DesignOps Summit
How inclusive design differs from accessibility
How companies can proactively partner with organizations to access a wide range of underserved and marginalized participants

Quick Reference Guide
[0:00:37] Introduction of Zariah
[0:02:04] Inclusive design
[0:04:11] An example of a principle that needs to be operationalized
[0:05:25] How to take a more operational approach to inclusive design
[0:08:04] Inclusivity is active, not passive. It’s also relational.
[0:14:18] Inclusivity is relational and communal
[0:15:03] More on the AEI organization
[0:17:24] Other work with HBCU students
[0:19:40] A reminder about the October 2-4 DesignOps Summit
[0:20:48] Organizations to partner with to advance inclusivity and equity
[0:24:21] Zariah’s gift for listeners

Increasing Health Equity and Improving the Service Experience for Under-Served Latine Communities in Arizona

In response to the existing health equity gap for communities of color, which the pandemic exacerbated, this collaboration tackled the challenge of increasing COVID-19 vaccination rates and improving health equity among Latina/x/o individuals of childbearing age in southern Arizona. Partnering with the local health department and a diverse Community of Practice, our team employed a Human-Centered Design approach to co-create and pilot solutions that address critical health needs and strengthen patient-practitioner trust. Our year-long design process led to the successful implementation of a community and a clinical pilot that enhanced healthcare navigation and engagement for our primary users, with early outcomes showing positive impacts on the local healthcare system. This experience underscores the power of creating space for cross-disciplinary collaboration and offers valuable insights into integrating equity-focused practices within service design. Attendees will learn about the effectiveness of coalition-based approaches and strategies for broadening service design practices to address complex health equity issues affecting diverse, low income communities.

Beyond Buzzwords: Adding Heart to Effective Slack Communication

In our fast-paced, attention-diverting world, swirling buzzwords compete for our time and our focus. We hypothesize that true productivity – creating outcomes and experiences that align with our mission, values, and goals – is about quality over quantity. And the way to achieve genuine quality is to prioritize humanity, especially in how we communicate. In our session, we challenge conventional wisdom by asserting that bringing the human side to communication is essential for achieving meaningful and sustainable success. We will take the audience through our tried and true best practices to craft effective Slack communications that lead to increased knowledge, improved application, and stronger team connections – with a dose of heart.

Increase Productivity and Drive Business Impact

Traditionally, UX Designers struggle to show the impact of the work that they do. This negatively impacts the influence that they have on product delivery, often relegating them to being ’doers’ and not being involved in strategic initiatives. The end result – product delivery is inefficient with rework taking up a large slice of time that could be used to drive innovation to generate more value.

In this session, we’ll outline how a simple UX Measurement framework can help change the tide of the conversation, giving the UXer a lift up into more strategic conversations, getting involved earlier in product delivery.

Crafting Metrics for UX Success with Kate Rutter

After a start in digital software, Kate Rutter realized that qualitative definitions of success could, and needed to be, made more quantitative. Years later, she’s Principal at Intelleto, Adjunct Professor in the IXD program at California College of the Arts, and the instructor of our upcoming UX workshop “Crafting Metrics for UX Success.”

In this episode, she reflects on the extraordinary success with qualitative metrics she has observed in the UX field, and the room for growth around numerical metrics, as well as the many challenges companies are faced with when trying to determine which metrics really matter. Kate’s four part workshop (August 6-7 and August 13-14) is intended to help designers gain a numerical understanding of success—and determine what metrics they need to measure in the first place (not just the easy ones!)

Liftoff! Practical Design Leadership to Elevate Your Team, Your Organization, and You

Top designers are often thrust into leadership roles, and it’s easy to forget that these two roles do not require the same skillset. In this episode, design managers and Liftoff! co-authors Chris Avore and Russ Unger discuss the mistakes and lessons they—and MANY others—have made in their new book, four years in the works. Liftoff! is a guide for new leaders looking for guidance about managing design teams effectively, and established managers who want to level up their expertise.

Handling Complexity: Framing a Scale of Design

Designing “at scale” assumes conceptual consensus on what the particular levels of that ‘scale’ actually are. In the last few years, UX professionals have specialized into UX researchers, product designers, service designers design strategists, etc. Nowadays, we’re also witnessing the debut of a new term: “system designers”. But do we really understand how these job titles and subthemes of UX fit within that scale of complexity in design?

In this presentation, we’ll introduce the basic levels of a scale of design, articulate how common UX job titles fit on the scale, and map how the work we commonly tackle in both research and design should also be informed by the scale of the problem we’re addressing. We’re also going to critique the (somewhat misguided) ways the current world of UX is handling the widespread growth in the complexity of our work.

Advancing Service Design with Ben Reason and Patrick Quattlebaum

Is it time to advance the practice of service design?

Ben Reason and Patrick Quattlebaum think so. They’re veteran service designers and co-authors of a pair of Rosenfeld books—Service Design: From Insight to Implementation and Orchestrating Experiences: Collaborative Design for Complexity respectively.

Ben, founder of LiveWork Studio, and Patrick, who founded Harmonic Design in Atlanta, join Lou to talk about launching a new Rosenfeld conference—Advancing Service Design—designed to highlight the service design’s potential for a new generation. They see opportunities for service design to go deeper—by integrating with and strengthening existing practices, like product management and agile, and broader—by better connecting systems that span multiple organizations (think healthcare).

Working with the Rosenfeld team, they’re creating a conference program that you can be a part of—they describe the kinds of presentation proposals they’re looking for from prospective speakers. Patrick and Ben hope you’ll join them in advancing service design; the conference will take place virtually December 3-4.

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• The real meaning of service design
• How service design is evolving
• Some crucial differences between the work in North America and Europe
• Why communication between organizations is so important
• How the upcoming conference will inspire and support you
• How to contribute and become part of the upcoming case studies
• How the panel discussions at the December conference will be different

Quick Reference Guide:
0:15 – Introduction to Ben and Patrick
1:50 – Being change agents to take Service Design to the next level
5:03 – Announcing a new conference: Advancing Service Design– Looking at Service Design Through Different Lenses
6:05 – Perspectives on different sides of the Atlantic
11:30 – Why service design exists in the first place
12:38 – More about the upcoming December virtual conference
17:40 – Call for proposals for the case studies and what they are looking for
19:00 – Ben’s ideas for the conference: The next iteration of service design going from within an organization to between multiple organizations
21:09 – Patrick’s ideas for the conference: Getting the people who want to transform things to communicate and the complexity of partnering together
23:05 – Bringing success from the inside
24:45 – Commercial break
27:10 – Personal story from Patrick about communication highlighting the broader concept of the case studies for the conference
32:30 – Personal story from Ben about connection across systems
37:16 – A different type of panel discussion to be at the conference
40:15 – Gifts for listeners

AI: Passionate defenses and reasoned critique [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]

AI adoption is rapidly accelerating in the insights space, and researchers are rushing to explore the possibilities and pitfalls it presents. Without a doubt, it will change the nature of our work, but where do we stand now? Our panelists will examine passionate defenses for the value of AI, offer reasoned critiques, discuss practical applications, and discuss how we can collectively move forward in an ethical and human-centered manner.

Attend all of our Advancing Research community workshops

Each free virtual workshop is made up of panelists who will share short provocations on engaging ideas to discuss as a group, as well as a leader in our field to moderate. If you’re looking for discussions that challenge the status quo and can truly advance research, look no further than our workshop series. (P.S. We’ll be drawing most of our Advancing Research 2025 conference speakers from those who present at upcoming workshops—so tune in for a sneak peek of what’s to come from #AR2025!)