The Humanity of Technology: Furthering the Greater Good with Jamika Burge

Though trained as a computer scientist, Jamika Burge admits she does not have the heart of a programmer; rather, she’s interested in surfacing and connecting with the humanity of the technology we create. Jamika has taken that approach in her past work, including a stint at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), where she studied the impact of games on learning. Jamika now leads AI Design Insights at CapitalOne, and is also one of the Advancing Research 2021 Conference curators. Here she shares the story of her career path, and the work she is doing with blackcomputeHER.org (pronounced ‘black computer’), an organization she co-founded that is dedicated to supporting computation and design workforce development for black women and girls.

Jamika Recommends:
Gendershades.org, a project by Joy Buolamwini, Lead Author and Timnit Gebru, PhD, Co-Author

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.

Centering Patients and Clinicians in a Complex Government Ecosystem

Government’s digital products and services often impact millions of people. In this session, two team members from Coforma, a digital services firm supporting both commercial and federal government modernization efforts, will discuss how they navigate challenges and foster success in supporting one agency’s effort to relieve over-burdened clinicians and improve patient care. At the center of their work is a suite of tools that enable the agency to advance equitable delivery of innovations in cancer treatment. Julie and Laureen will share their strategies for prioritization within a complex ecosystem of business owners, centering patients and clinicians through a strong UX/Product partnership, and leveraging roadmapping and user story mapping to define, focus, and clarify achievable MVP solutions.

What Is It Like To Be Part of The UX Team at Compass?

Join the moderator, Andreas Huebner (User Research Manager), as he runs a Q&A session with Amy Takata (User Researcher), and Craig Brookes (Staff Product Designer) to discuss life at Compass, the team culture, and the reasons for joining the Compass team.

Cultivating Design Ecologies of Care, Community, and Collaboration

“How we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale” (Adrienne Maree Brown).

To truly put humans in “human-centered design,” we must be care-centered. And how we practice care in our own teams or the “small scale” will influence the downstream impacts of our design work. This session is an invitation to explore how we practice and build ecologies of care, community, and collaboration to shift towards mutual power and symbiotic relationships throughout the design process. Drawing from a perspective of trauma-centeredness and harm reduction, we will all engage in deep (sometimes complex) reflection about what it means to care for yourself, with others, and develop an ethics of care to guide design teams. If the purpose of DesignOps is to build systems, processes and tools to support stronger design teams and individuals, this is the case for care: to show up as humans first, before we are designers, researchers, employers/the employed, technologists, or however you define your role.

The Compass Mission

Greg Petroff, the SVP of Design at Compass & UXR, talks about the Compass mission and how User Research and Design play a crucial role in building a groundbreaking platform for real estate agents.

The Unspoken Complexity of “Self-Care” with Deanna Zandt

At the July Civic Design Community call, hear from Deanna Zandt (she/her). The term “self-care” is thrown around a lot these days but there’s a more complicated picture than just taking a bubble bath and hoping for the best. In this call we talk about what’s missing from our conversations about self-care. We also discuss how human experience is fundamentally messy, but designers (and coders) like to make everything clean and neat. We’ve got to start reckoning with that. Our goal is that you walk away with a sense of the care structures that you have and need in your own lives, and a sense of what designing care into our systems could look like.

About our speaker:

Deanna Zandt is a writer, artist and award-winning technologist living in Brooklyn, NY. She spent 15 years working at the forefront of social justice, technology and media; after she burned out for the third time, she realized that maybe that work didn’t suit her particularly well. Currently, she spends her time: supporting other very impressive people and organizations behind-the-scenes with their technology; writing & drawing when she feels like it; walking and playing with her two dogs and their friends; connecting with humans near and far; and figuring out how to exist with meaning, fulfillment and as many giggles as possible. We’ll be talking (and very likely giggling) about her zine that traverses the constellation of self-soothing, self-care, community care and structural care.

Designing for Liberation, Rehearsing Freedom

Amahra Spence will speak on the themes of the conference, reflect back key insights that emerged over the course of the three days, and leave us with critical questions we can carry forward as a community, and individuals after the conference is over.

Make Things Better, Not Just Different with Erin Weigel

Have you ever thought about the similarities between art and science? Or about how math is the language of the universe? No? Welcome to a perspective shift. Ultimately this episode is about making things better, not just different. But how we get there is through a thoughtful and entertaining discussion with the witty and philosophical Erin Weigel.

Erin Weigel wants us to make things better, not just different. But how do we get there?

Lou had a thoughtful and entertaining discussion with Erin, always witty and philosophical—and often funny as hell. Join them on a perspective-shifting conversation that bridges disciplines and challenges conventional thinking, all in the pursuit of genuine improvement.

Erin is the author of the recently published Design for Impact: Your Guide to Designing Effective Product Experiments. She brings a fresh, accessible, and humor-filled take on what may seem like a dry topic: experimentation. Erin digs into the role of experimentation in design, advocating for always defaulting to experiments even if they’re the quick and dirty kind.

Erin and Lou also cover the following:

Wonky stuff like normal distributions, the central limit theorem, and what can be learned from outliers
The power of experiments to unite multidisciplinary teams by getting away from opinions and finding the truth
How professionals can use the principles of experimentation to navigate uncertainties and drive meaningful improvements
Discerning the impact of changes made

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

How Erin, with a fine arts background, became the principal designer at Booking.com and the Senior Group Product Design Manager at Deliveroo
The fundamental similarities between art and science
Why you should never skip the experimental phase
How experimentation unites people across disciplines
The difference between making things different and making them better

Quick Reference Guide:
[0:32] – Introduction of Erin; similarities between art and science
[4:05] – Barriers between art and science
[5:58] – Statistics is fun!
[12:37] – Defaulting to experimentation
[18:06] – Break – 5 reasons to use the Rosenverse
[20:36] – Experimentation as a uniting force
[25:49] – Make things better, not just different
[28:32] – Erin’s gift for listeners

[Demo] Stress-testing GenAI in user research synthesis

In this high-pressure scenario, the challenge was to conduct 17 user interviews in three days and synthesize a comprehensive report in just one additional day. I’ll explore how we used AI to streamline the research process, from transcription to synthesis, and how tools like ChatGPT contributed to efficient data processing and insight generation. We’ll reflect on the potential and pitfalls of using AI in accelerated user research, from practical aspects to more philosophical considerations on potential changes to the research process.

Takeaways

Practical insights into integrating AI with traditional research methodologies to expedite the research process
An overview of the effectiveness of AI transcription and synthesis tools in real-world research scenarios
Critical examination of AI’s role in data processing and how it compares with human analysis
Strategic considerations for service designers when employing AI to support rapid user research
Reflection on the ethical implications and potential impact on the quality of insights and researcher well-being when relying on AI to speed up research processes