Decentralizing Power through Design with Sahibzada Mayed and Lauren Lin

Sahibzada Mayed and Lauren Lin will be speakers at the upcoming DesignOps Summit on October 2-4, 2023. Their talk, “Cultivating Design Ecologies of Care, Community, and Collaboration,” will showcase the intersection of care-centeredness and design operations.

Lauren has wanted to be a designer since she was in third grade. What kind of designer? An “everything” designer! From a young age, she embraced the idea that “you can design anything” from fashion to environments to moods and feelings. Today she employs ethical research practices and co-design to shift power and amplify youth voices, design toys, and bring play into her work at Ideo Play Lab.

Mayed has a social service and social impact background. Through a community-oriented storytelling approach, they co-lead strategy and research at Cause and Affect, a relational design consultancy in Canada.

Lauren and Mayed’s partnership began with conversations and exploration about what they could do to shift power dynamics and create more cohesive and engaging designs for all. The biggest hindrance, say Lauren and Mayed, is power hierarchies. Design leaders need to critically think about social identities, institutional positions, and other complexities and dimensions. How power shows up in our practices is always shifting and changing, and decentralizing power has to be an ongoing and emergent process.

And it all starts with ideas and conversations. Mayed and Lauren have found that speculative design is a powerful way to reflect on the “now” and dream about what the future could look like. All real-world shifts begin with ideas, relationships, and conversations. These elements are at the heart of design.

What you’ll learn from this episode:
– About Lauren and Mayed’s backgrounds
– How their partnership came about
– About the talk titled “Cultivating Design Ecologies of Care, Community, and
– Collaboration” that they will deliver at October’s DesignOps Summit
– About power hierarchies in design and what design leaders can do to help decentralize power
– About the role and potential of speculative design

Quick Reference Guide
[0:00:19] Introduction of Sahibzada Mayed and Lauren Lin
[0:01:03] Mayed and Lauren’s backgrounds
[0:05:53] The working partnership between Mayed and Lauren
[0:08:45] Power hierarchies and design
[0:11:56] The DesignOps leader’s role
[0:15:26] Alternative means of engagement
[0:18:36] DesignOps Summit, October 2-6, 2023
[0:19:59] A care-centered approach to the future through establishing patterns
[0:24:37] Mayed and Lauren’s gifts for the audience

Changemakers: How Leaders Can Design Change in an Insanely Complex World

Authors Maria Giudice & Christopher Ireland join Lou to discuss their new book, Changemakers: How Leaders Can Design Change in an Insanely Complex World, which comes out on January 17.

Get a taste of what they cover in the book, from systems thinking to navigating change, and how to look broadly at patterns to understand the context in which you are establishing change. The authors explain the wide range of industries they drew from in their research and interviews, as well as the highly emotional aspect of changemaking in society today. Bonus: they share some tools you can use to become a changemaker.

Research Repositories: A global project by the ResearchOps Community (Videoconference)

Building Community and Common Trends to Look for in 2021 (Videoconference)

In this call we speak with our foremost DesignOps community experts Meredith Black and Elyse Hornbacher. Touching on their backgrounds and the creation of the DesignOps Assembly, trends we are seeing in the community and for DesignOps in general, future trends in 2021, and why we need community now more than ever.

Lisanne Norman on Why She Left UX Research

Lisanne Norman entered the tech field as a UX researcher in 2015 and quickly advanced to lead researcher at Dell, then Visa. She founded Black UX Austin and was the UX lead researcher at Gusto.

And then she left in 2022. Because she had had enough. And because she wanted to make a difference. She is now co-director of DEI at the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut.

In today’s interview, Lisanne shares her career journey and the tools she acquired in various positions along the way. We get a glimpse of what it’s like to be a Black woman in tech. We also get a hint at what it might take to keep a Black woman (or other individuals from marginalized groups) in the space. We hear of the microaggressions that can and do occur in the workplace, and Lisanne helps us imagine the exhaustion of functioning in such an environment day after day. She has worked in established, entrenched cultures and in young, seemingly flexible startups, and she found that both environments are lacking in their efforts to bring marginalized people groups to the table.

Lisanne will be sharing more at Advancing Research 2023, March 27-29. Her talk is “Why I Left Research.”

What you’ll learn from this episode:
• What the UX research world looks like from a Black woman’s point of view
• The types of microaggressions Lisanne endured in the workplace and public places like airports
• Why being a marginalized voice at work – even in a young, flexible culture – can be exhausting
• The difference between culture-fit and culture-add
• What companies need to do to attract and retain BIPOC employees – and why it’s worth the effort to do so

Quick Reference Guide
• [00:15] Introduction of Lisanne
• [01:38] Lisanne explains how she stumbled upon research as a possible career and found herself working for Dell
• [05:19] Lisanne’s time working directly with Dell as part of their design team and her later transition to Visa
• [12:40] Lisanne explains the frustrations she endured at Visa and her switch to a young e-commerce company
• [19:13] Feeling weighed down by microaggressions, keeping notes, and educating those who should know better
• [21:13] Covid, taking a break, Black UX Austin, Gusto, and George Floyd
• [27:55] BREAK: Books recently published by Rosenfeld Media
• [30:08] On what it would take for Lisanne to get back into UX research
• [35:01] On the potential of learning from past modules of successful “adding”
• [37:41] Lisanne’s gift to our listeners: POCIT (People of Color in Tech)

Creating Insights through Analysis and Synthesis with Steve Portigal

Believe it or not, Steve Portigal’s UX research classic Interviewing Users came out ten years ago, back in 2013. A few things about user research have changed since then, to put it mildly, so we at Rosenfeld did two things: we convinced Steve to write a second edition (coming out October 17), and to join us on the Rosenfeld Review to discuss all the things that have changed.

In addition to being an author, Steve is a user researcher, consultant, and teacher. He helps companies grow their businesses, culture, and brands by interviewing users. He also helps companies build more mature in-house research practices.

Having been on both sides of the interviewing process – as both interviewer and interviewee – Steve can empathize with both roles. Over the last decade, he has seen user research evolve from a focus on consumer products to company culture and supportive technologies in the B2B space.

Effective research, in addition to data gathering, involves analysis and synthesis. Steve defines analysis as breaking bigger things into smaller things and synthesis as putting what was broken down back together into a new framework, or insight. This is where the magic of research happens. A chapter dedicated to the art of analysis and synthesis is one of the profound additions to this latest edition of his book.

What you’ll learn from this episode:
– About Interviewing Users and what’s new in the second edition
– About Steve’s work as a researcher, author, and consultant and how his work has shifted over the last decade
– Changes in the research field and why most of us are researchers to one degree or another, even if it’s not in your title or job description
– How analysis and synthesis are different and why both are needed for insights
– About the “We already knew that” response many researchers get and what it really means

Quick Reference Guide
[0:00:19] Introduction of Steve Portigal
[0:04:30] Experience on both sides of the interview process
[0:08:06] Shifts in language and jargon Steve has noted over the last decade
[0:12:13] The evolution of user research – less with consumers and more within businesses or B2B
[0:15:10] Speculation on where the leading edge of user research will be – or perhaps more importantly, who will be doing it – in another 10 years
[0:19:02] Rosenfeld Media Communities
[0:21:17] What’s new in the 2nd Edition version of Interviewing Users – analysis, synthesis, and insights
[0:28:38] “We already knew that” phenomenon that researchers often encounter
[0:32:20] Steve’s gift for listeners

Measuring Up: Using Product Research for Organizational Impact

Research for product work is well established; but how do you lead your research team to shape organizational goals? We’ll use a case study from Google to demonstrate how many of the same techniques, methods, and skills you and your team have today can be used to guide an organization’s goals. We’ll also discuss key changes to make for organizational success – from integrating with other insight functions to shifting how your team defines themselves and their work. The results are research organizations that produce insights to impact how your organization defines their goals.

Research After UX

Moving the research function out from UX can transform how insights influence product-making in an organization. In this talk, Nalini explains how and why she led this shift for her team at Salesforce, as well as the move’s effect on their work and impact. Nalini will also share lessons learned in the process – “the how to’s” and the “absolutely how not to’s” – that may inspire and guide leaders and individual contributors alike.

Out of the FOG: A Non-traditional Research Approach to Alignment

Product teams, including those I work with, struggle to overcome the grinding momentum of product delivery timelines to make room for adequate discovery, learning, and application through research. The game of product development becomes fiercer when it’s not the first time, but the fourth team assembled to tackle a complex product space. In well-trod territory, strong opinions may abound, and talking past each other and rehashing approaches is rampant. Challenges that face researchers as partners in product development include establishing a sense of shared team vision, separating facts from fiction, and moving the team past hang-ups to establish a research strategy and product direction. This case introduces the idea of “grinding momentum” and outlines a stakeholder engagement process known as a FOG session that helps all team members across functional expertise areas claim voice, hear others, and share in collective aha moments that define next steps. Using a mixed-methods approach, a process is outlined to frameshift the value of existing knowledge spanning many departments within an organization, bring together distinct expertise vocabularies and analyses, and propel product partners to identify true knowledge gaps.

The Power of Care: From Human-Centered Research to Humanity-Centered Leadership

What is the role of care in user research? Why is care the greatest superpower of user research research—not only in what we do but how we lead? In this talk, Etienne discusses the importance of inclusive leadership and shares lessons on leading through care. This session will help researchers leverage their research strengths for leadership as individual contributors, team leads, and people managers alike.