Now published: Research That Scales by Kate Towsey!

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.

Compass 101: Growing Your Career In A Startup World

Let’s talk about design careers–and about doing design work under the influence of just the right amount of caffeine. These Compass design leaders guide you through a discussion of a day in the life of product designers at a fast-growing enterprise. And they’ll also talk about their journeys getting there.

  • Hear about design and career opportunities in a technology company that is bringing meaningful disruption to real estate.
  • See what it’s like to design beautiful productivity tools for real estate agents and an industry that seems to thrive on complexity.
  • Get insight into how your own career path is reflected in the many paths that lead to good product design.

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 Written knowledge-bases (if you have them) can be dry or become out of date, and replicating hallway conversations where you can bump into new people or share stories (and commiserations!)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.

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.)

Empowering Communities Through the Researcher in Residence Program

We are excited to welcome Xenia Adjoubei, Research Specialist in territorial analysis, sustainability and emergent tech, and Associate Director at Studio intO to our upcoming Advancing Research session on Wednesday, 29 March at 9:45am-10:15am.

Xenia will share her insights and experiences on a range of topics, including the power of community-led research, the democratization of knowledge, and the impact of new-old tools in promoting social good.

Her talk will be an engaging and thought-provoking exploration of the role of research and innovation in addressing humanitarian crises and promoting social justice. We invite you to join us for this inspiring and informative event, and to be a part of the conversation about the future of research and innovation in our communities.

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.

Why Community is Key to Professionalizing Design (Videoconference)

Over the last 5 years, design as a profession has become more established in the public sector. What does it mean to professionalize design? And how does community play a part? Jaskiran Kang, Head of Service Design at TPXImpact shares her experience moving into government from the private sector, leading design at the Department for Education, and building community to further design practice.

The Other L Word—Addressing Workplace Loneliness with Kat Vellos

Kat Vellos, author of Connected From Afar: A Guide for Staying Close When You’re Far Away and We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships, is our opening speaker on day one of the DesignOps Summit this October 21-23, 2020.

Here, she discusses the issues of loneliness in the workplace, and how managers can support their teams—especially in the time of remote work and added stresses from a global pandemic. In addition to supporting employees’ humanity, a manager who keeps their staff happy enough to stay can have a major impact on a company’s bottom line—at the average national voluntary turnover rate of 25%, a company of 100 people with an average salary of $50,000 will spend between $625,000 and $2.5 million dollars on staff replacement costs in one year.

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.”

Repository Retrospective: Learnings from Introducing a Central Place for UX Research

While many researchers see the value of a central research repository, how to introduce one in an organization is still a big question. Today we have the chance to learn from two researchers who have done it.

Taylor Jennings, Senior UX Researcher at Chili Piper, and Joe Nelson, User Experience Researcher at MasterControl, will share their process and experience gained from implementing their research repository. We’ll cover how they realized the need for a repository, how they convinced stakeholders, evaluated solutions, and what they’d do differently in hindsight.

Join us live as we leave plenty of opportunities for the audience to ask questions.