Healing Toxic Stress

From the pandemic to mass layoffs to burnout, designers have been enduring years of crisis and toxic stress. For some people, living through these kinds of events can be traumatic. Resmaa Menakem defines trauma as “anything that is too much, too soon, too fast, or for too long without being attended to by something reparative or healing.”

DesignOps professionals and people managers are perfectly positioned to learn about trauma and re-shape their organizations to be spaces for healing, instead of harm. In this talk, participants will understand the prevalence of toxic stress in the workplace, be able to start identifying signs of trauma within themselves, and walk away with three practical ways to create an environment of healing.

Curating Conferences: A Chat with the Bureau of Digital’s Carl Smith

Lou talks with Carl Smith, Owner at Bureau of Digital, about the challenges of curating the right content to make design and UX conferences successful for both the owners and the attendees.

Widening the Aperture: The Case for Taking a Broader Lens to the Dialogue between Products and Culture

We’re all ultimately charged with making our products as useful and beloved as possible, but in order to do that, researchers must widen the aperture of user research. Usability, user journeys, and the like are critical, but the reality is that wider cultural factors provide the filter through which people experience your product. We need to dedicate more attention to how wider cultural factors shape what people need from a product experience—the dialogue between the wide and the narrow apertures are crucial to creating beloved, essential products.

In this talk, Neil Barrie, Co-Founder and CEO of TwentyFirstCenturyBrand, shares his perspectives on research’s role in helping companies build deeper, meaningful relationships with customers based on his work building the brands of the likes of Airbnb, Pinterest, Headspace, Pepsico, Monzo and Bumble.

His talk will address:

• How culture is the lens through which people experience products
• Why products are the catalyst to purpose, facilitating behavior changes that can take marketing years to achieve
• What we can learn from insider cases of culturally driven UX innovation from leading unicorns like Flo Health, Pinterest and Airbnb

Scaling Accessibility Through Design Systems

Incorporating accessibility can be seen as a daunting task, especially for products that have already been released. Alexis Lucio, Senior Accessibility Lead at Splunk, will share her journey in making accessibility a first-class citizen within Splunk Design System. Topics include: how to advocate for accessibility, utilizing use cases to optimize design and dev, how to utilize user input, and ideas on how to collaborate with cross-functional partners.

Coffee with Lou #4: Taking a Peek Under the Rosenbot’s Hood (Videoconference)

What happens when you cross an eager librarian, a happy puppy, and 800 UX experts? You get the Rosenbot—Rosenfeld’s new GPT-4 level chatbot, trained on our books and hundreds of hours of conference and community call recordings. What went into creating the Rosenbot? Lou is joined by SimplyPut’s Peter van Dijck, an old friend from the IA community and the chief architect of the Rosenbot. If you’re beginning your journey into developing generative AI products, you’ll want to join Lou and Peter to learn from their lessons, ask questions, and share your own thoughts on AI’s role in making curated content more useful and impactful.

Jazz Improvisation as a Model for Team Collaboration

Great collaboration is the secret sauce of successful development teams. At its core, collaboration comes from the culture of your company and the dynamics of your team. This entertaining session will demonstrate how the dynamics of jazz improvisation serve as a model for better teamwork with live music on stage. The lessons from jazz are particularly important for design, much of which involves collaborating with others: gathering requirements from stakeholders, ideating in project teams, and iterating with developers. Great design requires practitioners to be not only skilled craftsmen equipped with the right tools, but also expert collaborators and facilitators. Jazz gives us a model to help us move in that direction in an modern, agile way. Jim Kalbach will be joined by three special guests.

Jazz Improvisation as a Model for Team Collaboration

Great collaboration is the secret sauce of successful development teams. At its core, collaboration comes from the culture of your company and the dynamics of your team. This entertaining session will demonstrate how the dynamics of jazz improvisation serve as a model for better teamwork with live music on stage. The lessons from jazz are particularly important for design, much of which involves collaborating with others: gathering requirements from stakeholders, ideating in project teams, and iterating with developers. Great design requires practitioners to be not only skilled craftsmen equipped with the right tools, but also expert collaborators and facilitators. Jazz gives us a model to help us move in that direction in a modern, agile way. Jim Kalbach will be joined by three special guests.

Radical Participatory Research: Decolonizing Participatory Processes

Have you ever been a part of a participatory research process or the use of a participatory method only to find that it fell short of any real shift of power dynamics? Have you ever compared notes with another participatory design researcher only to find out their definition of participatory research and design is different than your own? Have you faced opposition from your organization in practicing research in a more participatory way? What does research even mean, what is its purpose, and how does research change from community to community, context to context? Based on that, what are the future possibilities of research?

Come, join the conversation, and see what Victor Udoewa has to say about such experiences, the different definitions of participatory research and how participatory research can actually be used to reinforce hierarchies. One way he has found to dismantle that system is to practice radical participatory research. He will share what that means, how it looks, and how you can begin moving in that direction along with a direct challenge to our community of researchers in regards to our own power.

Radical Participatory Design: Decolonizing Participatory Design Processes

Have you ever been a part of a participatory process or use of a participatory method only to find that it fell short of any real shift of power dynamics? Have you ever compared notes with another participatory designer only to find out their definition of participatory design is different than your own? Have you faced opposition from your organization in practicing design in a more participatory way? What does it even mean to practice participatory design in the civic space, for people in our society to be engaged in the practice of designing ways in which our societies can flourish?

Join us, come into the conversation, and see what Victor Udoewa has to say about such experiences, the different definitions of participatory design and how participatory design can actually be used to reinforce hierarchies. One way he has found to dismantle that system is to practice radical participatory design. He will share what that means, how it looks, and how you can begin moving in that direction along with a direct challenge to our community of designers in regards to our own power.

Why Social Justice Frameworks are Necessary for Successful DEI/JEDI Initiatives

As a DesignOps professional, your work holds power—the power to reinforce systemic marginalization, or the power to dismantle it. Spencer Stultz will focus on the intersection of Operations and equity, and explore the power dynamics and cultural norms that can impede true organizational change. In this session, you will:

• Learn about ways that Design Operations can (unintentionally) enforce harmful dominant cultural standards
• Explore alternative approaches to Operations that center equity—by examining community-oriented social justice principles that can address institutional failures and foster change
• Gather tools to enable and empower you to dismantle harmful systems and processes within your own practice