Three Key Climate Initiatives and How You Can Help
This session will showcase three essential initiatives—Project Drawdown, SustainableUX, and Climate Designers—that UX designers, researchers, and writers interested in addressing the climate crisis absolutely should know about. We won’t just inform you; each panelist will offer you a small yet concrete way you can help them achieve their missions. Join us for this hour-long session and discover how your participation can drive meaningful change in the fight against climate change.
Learn more about SustainableUX, ClimateDesigners, and Project Drawdown in the resources linked on this page!
Katie Swindler: Life and Death Design
What can designers learn from astronauts and race car drivers?
In this episode of the Rosenfeld Review, Lou speaks with Katie Swindler to answer this and similar questions in her upcoming Rosenfeld Media book, Life and Death Design. Katie’s new book will help us redefine how we might view a core human function – specifically, the stress response – and how stress can be an informative tool for designers.
As an experienced presenter who has spoken on UX topics internationally at industry events, Katie believes that brands who wish to truly connect with consumers must expand utility through emotion. She illustrates how leveraging stress-informed design enables users to perform optimally during high-stress or traumatic experiences.
Important questions Katie tackles are:
How does understanding the stress response help designers deal with high-stress situations?
How can designers leverage redundancy and biomimicry to enhance a final product?
How stress-informed design can support experts in a way that preserves an organic workflow?
How did conscientious attention to detail in design help save the lives of heroic users?
What is “abusive design,” and how do we avoid it?
Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: A Chat with Steve Portigal
A couple of researchers walk into a bar. After a few drinks, they fess up their most embarrassing tales of research gone wrong. In this podcast, Steve Portigal talks about how that one night at the bar (and cat pee) sparked the idea for his book Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries. Learn why Steve believes in the value of failure stories, and how he convinced a skeptical Lou to publish the book.
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
“Just Make it Look Good” and Other Ways We’re Misunderstood
Research helps us understand the customer’s needs, behaviors, and attitudes, design meets those needs through interaction and visual expertise, and content helps make sure the entire experience is expressed in the customer’s language. It seems simple, right? So where does it go wrong? Hear from Compass leaders about how misunderstanding these roles leads to poor collaboration and how we can change the way we work together to deliver incredible customer experiences.
- Hear from leaders in design, content, and research about the most common ways their role is misunderstood and the impact this has on the customer experience.
- Learn ways design, content, and research can communicate and collaborate better to collectively create better experiences that scale.
- Get a better understanding of the unique role design, content, and research play in our customer’s lives and how to use each other’s secret powers to deliver better customer outcomes.
Peter Merholz: Design at Scale is People!
Design at scale is perhaps the most interesting challenge facing the design industry right now. How do you maintain quality and not get bogged down as your team grows? Much of the discussion focuses on systems and processes, but that starting with systems runs exactly contrary to the true value that design brings to companies, which is a humanistic and creative problem-framing and problem-solving approach. In other words, this focus on systems could ironically undercut design’s potential within organizations— in other words, “Design at Scale” is humanism at scale, and share what’s needed to keep people at the center of this work.
Peter Merholz will be both a speaker and a workshop instructor during this year’s Design at Scale conference! Here, Lou and Peter muse over stories from the early days of information architecture before meandering their way to contrasting UX in the public versus private sectors. They also discuss a preview of Peter’s talk at the conference, Design at Scale is People!
Design is About Understanding People: A Chat with Irene Au
How can startups employ good design practices from the beginning? Lou talks with Irene Au, Design Partner at Khosla Ventures, about her work with setting up companies with robust design practices, and why user research is an investment every company should make.
Leading Teams That Execute: A Chat with Phillip Hunter
What does an interdisciplinary enterprise team need to focus on to ensure customer satisfaction? Lou talks with Phillip Hunter, Head of UX at Alexa Skills, about the unique challenges of growing and leading enterprise UX teams to success. Phillip Hunter is the Theme Leader for Leading Teams That Execute at 2017’s Enterprise UX Conference.
Imagination Work Meets Remote Work: Reflections on Collaboration with MURAL’s Mariano Suarez-Battan
Mariano Suarez-Battan is the co-founder and CEO of MURAL, a tool for remote collaboration—and longtime partner/sponsor of Rosenfeld Media’s conferences. MURAL was founded in 2011 after Mariano experienced first-hand the struggle of working remotely with a large, distributed team while designing video games. In this episode of the Rosenfeld Review, Mariano and Lou discuss the challenges of collaboration among remote teams and how platforms like MURAL can level the playing field between coworkers, often flattening hierarchies and changing culture in the process. Mariano also shares his predictions about how workplaces will operate five years in the future.
Mariano’s shoutout – IBM’s Phil Gilbert, one of MURAL’s early adopters, and Tim Brown, former CEO at Ideo who introduced Mariano to Phil.
MURAL is sponsoring all three of Rosenfeld Media conferences this year: Advancing Research, Enterprise Experience, and DesignOps Summit. Be sure to stop by their booth!
Marc Rettig and Lou Rosenfeld discuss how designers can help reshape organizational culture
Well-crafted UX depends on having a company culture that’s set up to design well. Can you influence the culture of your company? Yes. Marc and Lou discuss three unique approaches to culture change happening in corporations like IBM and Citrix today. This is a preview into a panel Marc will lead on Designing Organizational Culture at Enterprise UX in San Antonio (May 13-15).
