What Design Research can Learn from Documentary Filmmaking
Video can be so much more than just a presentation aid and a way to engage stakeholders; it can also be a means to explore, understand, and convey deep human truths. Through the lens of documentary filmmakers and visual ethnographers, film can be a powerful medium with which to capture context and emotion, and tell nuanced stories. In this fireside chat with three design researchers who have extensive experience working with video and documentary techniques, you will hear how they integrate documentary filmmaking approaches and methods into their research practices.
HITS, Microsoft’s internal human insight system: From research library to living body of knowledge (Videoconference)
Imagine a workplace where every research request you receive takes into account what your organization already knows. Product teams have the answers to common UX questions at their fingertips, and finding insights has become second nature to everyone. You rarely wonder whether the insights you find are still true because other researchers are always adding new evidence that supports them. In this session we discuss HITS, the human insight library Microsoft uses internally to achieve these goals, and the culture we’ve been working to develop around its use.
Advancing the Inclusion of Womxn in Research Practices (Videoconference)
The overturn of Roe v Wade in the US has highlighted the systematic challenges and exclusions which *womxn continue to face in their day to day lives. Additionally, the rising recognition of the importance of intersectional thinking, shifting definitions of womxnhood, the potential biases in big data, and many other shifting cultural contexts all contribute to an evolving set of best practices for how we should effectively be including womxn within the research process.
Theme 2: Communicate
Delivering products is not enough. We must also COMMUNICATE the needs of our audiences, the value of our practices, and the unique skills we bring to the enterprise table. COMMUNICATE discusses how to make others understand and appreciate UX value, how to convey user insights, and how to find a common language with our non-UX partners within enterprise.
Making Space for Community Knowledge-sharing in a Distributed World
Staying connected and learning from your teammates on a distributed team or in a highly siloed organization can be hard. Written knowledge-bases (if you have them) can be dry or become out of date, and replicating hallway conversations where you can bump into new people or share stories (and commiserations!) with coworkers can feel out of reach in a virtual environment. Despite the obstacles, I’ve found that cultivating an engaged remote community and fostering peer-to-peer knowledge sharing is possible. This talk will cover real-world tactics I use at the US Digital Service to engage communities and empower people to be resources to each other, whether they’re in the same room or thousands of miles apart.
The Tale of Two Companies: Building a Successful UX Practice in a Century-Old Enterprise
How do you establish a thriving UX organization in a century-old company? Our opening presentation is a tale of two organizations and two different UX leaders. They followed very different paths and come from different industries, yet their stories of success and lessons for others have a lot in common. Rob Mitzel spent his entire career at Ford, starting from a Safety Engineer and changing roles to evolve into a Design Ops Manager, as the company evolved. Sébastien Malo parachuted to CN (Canadian National Railway) only a couple of years ago, but has already changed the course of his organization. Rob and Sebastien compare and contrast stories of how UX adapted and iterated their teams, skills and service to meet the needs of an evolving enterprise IT organization and the business at large.
When Design Ops Comes in H.O.T. : A Tale of a Transformed Design Org
TIn their first 60 days at Zendesk, Briana and Christina, a 2 person design ops team, conducted a Program Manager Audit looking at these 3 key areas: People, Process, and Portfolio.
90 days later, Product Design has transformed from a siloed, disjointed team into a well-organized, collaborative environment with a unified tool strategy, inclusive team spaces and more focus on design craft.
In this talk you will learn how to not only conduct a thorough and data-centric Program Manager Audit, but how to come in H.O.T. (Humble, Orchestrated, and Timely.)
Shifting Toward Community-Led Innovation in Local Government
This session is a panel discussion about what community-centered design looks like in local government. We’ll talk about why it’s important to collaborate with communities, the conditions that are required to practice community-centered design, and what it looks like in action.
Understanding the Strategy for Civic Design in a Complex City: Istanbul
Depending on where you are in the world, there are several reasons why civic design has become a valuable methodology for governments. Within the scope of our work in Istanbul, We will talk about increasing the capacity of institutions producing and providing public services to create innovative services, system design, and adapting civic design models to innovative service development processes for local governments in developing countries.
Puzzled? How to Coordinate Humans for Complex Challenges
How do we coordinate people for complex challenges? Certainly not with traditional work structures, designed to optimize for performance. Rather, we need new ways of working—new structures—that have been specifically designed to coordinate people for understanding. We’ll look at a framework that can be used by teams, organizations, and other groups of humans working on complex problems.
Stephen P. Anderson is a speaker and author who spends too much thinking about visual collaboration, how people learn, and board games; not necessarily in that order. Oh, and he’s on a mission: To make learning the hard stuff fun, by creating ‘things to think with’ and ‘spaces’ for generative play. This mission has led Stephen to MURAL, where he facilitates design strategy and innovation. Stephen’s newest book, Figure It Out: Getting From Information to Understanding, has been described as both “required reading for designers and anyone else who needs to explain things” and a book that will “change the way you see the world.”
