Now published: Research That Scales by Kate Towsey!

Building Bridges Across Organizational Silos

Providing information to public transit riders is complex. The information needs to be consistent across touchpoints and channels. Like many old, large organization ours is defined by its silos. When information is inconsistent across channels and touchpoints our organizational silos become apparent. More importantly, inconsistent information causes confusion for transit riders. While we can’t stop maintaining and improving the information in our ‘silos,’ we build bridges across them so that riders get consistent information. This approach requires us to be intentional and patient.

Becoming a ResearchH.E.R (Highly Enterprise Ready)

I very quickly noticed how my entire professional journey had molded me into a UX Researcher that had a broader reach with teams, people, customers/users, and industry knowledge. In the Enterprise space I was/am able to successfully leverage so many of my other skills obtained in my other positions to make me a dynamic well-rounded researcher outside of just knowing principles, cognitive behaviors, data synthesis, and writing reports. It was the culmination of all of me, owning and leveraging ALL of my experiences that allowed me to connect the UX dots to my previous 15 years of experience. Eventually, I was doing onsite interviews with various Silicon Valley companies and then landed at LinkedIn. I am a ResearchH.E.R – Highly Enterprise Ready.

A Civic Designer’s Guide to Mindful Conflict Navigation

As civic designers, we are adept at listening well, understanding complex interactions between people and within systems, and identifying creative opportunities. Working on teams that often comprise many disciplines, perspectives, and motivations, we must approach teamwork with intention and importance. While differing opinions and interpersonal dynamics are inevitabilities of collaborative work, our civic design superpowers uniquely position us to navigate conflict skillfully.

While tackling some of our communities’ toughest, most intractable challenges, we must care for ourselves and our teams too– so that we can live well and serve sustainably. This session will begin with guided self-reflection. We will then explore conflict navigation through a lens of mindfulness, systems-thinking, and human-centered design.

Operationalizing DesignOps

Today’s problems are often yesterday’s solutions—quick fix solutions often perpetuate the problem or circumvent them completely. How can we identify the right opportunities for DesignOps & ensure the processes or programs that emerge are successful?

We’ll take a system-dynamics approach to map out the process, flows, and operational models of an organization. By combining this strategy and building technology that focuses on automation, orchestration, and measurement, we can achieve the speed, scale, and quality goals of any organization.

Expand DesignOps Leadership as a Chief of Staff

Today’s design organizations continuously face increased scope, complex deliverables, challenging people dynamics, and pressure to hit business goals. For this reason, it’s important to reevaluate how DesignOps leadership is supported so that they can be as efficient and effective as possible. An emerging solution to this challenge is the Chief of Staff role — DesignOps practitioners skilled in values-driven leadership at scale, ruthless prioritization, and building trusted partnerships, who can serve as an advisor, proxy, and operational leader to the heads of large design teams. Here’s what Isaac has learned while defining this new leadership path in DesignOps at Salesforce.

Takeaways:

  • How to lead your team as the scope of your responsibility widens
  • How to build trusted operational partnerships
  • How to navigate complex situations on your team as you scale up

Designing for the infrastructures of everyday life

Asking after the dynamics of artificial intelligence’s extraordinary recent rise recalls Hemingway’s famous line about going bankrupt: “In two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” That combination underscores the emergence of many technologies, of course. It creeps up on us, and then is suddenly moving at speed, everywhere. This makes it hard for cities and places to work with the grain of tech, in order to produce equitable or sustainable outcomes. Although we rarely do it, tech asks us to step back and ask the deeper questions lurking behind all the noise.

In this talk I’ll describe how everyday technologies, digital and physical combined, define how we live together; how they tend to articulate what we stand for as a society, or how our cities work — and what’s on the table now. Drawing together inspiring projects and cases ranging from Norway to Japan, and from new cities to reimagined regions, I’ll suggest how we might align design practices in order to address our contemporary shared challenges, like climate breakdown, social cohesion, and sweeping demographic changes. As AI moves beyond shuffling playlists or improving grammar and starts coordinating mobility, energy, and water systems, or how housing is allocated or buildings are made, we must rapidly figure out how design, governance, and community best understand and take advantage of these new distributed, decentralised and collaborative technologies. In doing so, we might well challenge our preconceptions of technology, economy, and community themselves.

Resilient Enterprise Design

What is resilient enterprise design, and how can you incorporate it into your own enterprise organization? Craig Villamor is the VP of Product Experience & Design at AppDynamics and he talks about applying context and practicality to enterprise UX design to build resiliency.

Anticipating Risk, Regulating Tech: A Playbook for Ethical Technology Governance

IFTF’s Ethical OS Toolkit has been used by many organizations and agencies across the civic sector, including the California state legislature, the United States Conference of Mayors, and other local governments, to bring more foresight and long-term thinking to policy decisions about new technologies. In response to high demand from government entities, and with support from the Tingari-Silverton Foundation, the IFTF Governance Futures Lab has developed this Playbook for Ethical Tech Governance. Adapted from the original Ethical OS, the Playbook will equip civil servants with the skills and tools to proactively resolve ethical dilemmas emerging from the constantly evolving landscape of new technology and new social and political dynamics. It’s intended to help those working in government, or leaders in the public sector, to make better long-term decisions by increasing their foresight capacity, allowing them to develop future-facing regulatory structures that help them anticipate the worst consequences of technology before they happen.

In this session, Ilana Lipsett will present Institute for the Future’s Playbook for Ethical Tech Governance, a decision-making guide for governments and leaders who are charged with regulating change and mitigating risk, all while encouraging innovation. The guide was designed to help safeguard against both intended and unintended consequences of techno-social shifts. This session will include an overview of the Playbook, along with a live demo of how to apply these principles and put them into action using a Decision Tree worksheet that accompanies the guide.

Power of Insights: Why sharing is better than silos with Uber’s Insights Platform (Videoconference)

Uber is powered by insights. Chances are good that your company is, too. We’ve all had firsthand experiences of an inconvenient truth: insights are only as good as our ability to make use of them, and centralizing insights in a tool is only one piece of the puzzle. In this session we’ll not only share how we created our insights database, Kaleidoscope, but also what we’ve learned about changing behavior through partnerships and processes at an organizational level.

Product and Design at Bloomberg: A 15-year Evolution

Bloomberg’s UX team is excited to share its 15-year evolution — from employing UX as a new, innovative process to UX playing a central role in every part of the product development lifecycle. Ash Brown, Global Head of UX, will share how the company’s UX team has grown and how it collaborates with its partners in Product. This will be followed by a panel discussion with two designers and two product managers who will talk about the different ways they’ve worked together. Bring your questions, because we’ll close with a Q&A session.