Thinking in systems to address climate with Sheryl Cababa (Videoconference)

Our sixth session, led by Sheryl Cababa, author of Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers explores the relationship between systems thinking and climate solutions. We use real-world examples to discuss systemic and organisational power dynamics, incentives, and how seeing and understanding them can integrate climate solutions into your work.

Moderated by Alexis Oh

Navigating the Rapid Shifts in Tech’s Turbulent Terrain

Balancing Power, People, and Progress in an AI-driven World

In this talk, I aim to explore the nexus of power concentration within big tech, AI-driven automation, and the ramifications on the tech job market, with a specific focus on design operations and adjacent roles. By examining the underlying dynamics behind power, the recent tech layoffs, and the rapid AI takeover of many aspects of our professional and personal life, I seek to understand the broader impact to the tech industry and the evolution of the profession of Design Operations. This discourse serves as a call for mechanisms to create the pathways for rapid learning and unlearning, and keep pushing designers to reinvent themselves.

Radical Participatory Research: Decolonizing Participatory Processes

Although large areas of the federal government focused on design as a practice do not closely involve the citizenry in their design processes, Victor Udoewa, Chief Experience Officer and Service Design Lead, NASA, has taken a vastly different approach to end user design methodology in government.

In this episode of the Rosenfeld Review, Victor brings us up to speed on participatory design and its pros and cons. He also explains his radical approach to it—a meta-methodology he’s used in service and system design—and how his radical approach enables people to participate in and influence high-level government design projects.

Victor shares his insights around key areas of participatory design, including:

• A redefined approach to “radical” participatory design, and how this difference meaningfully distinguishes his work from a socio-human perspective
• A focus on his department’s efforts to help develop the economy in support of small businesses
• Weighing the impact of “power” in design organizations as they shape methodology from a higher-level perspective
• How incorporating end user insights can holistically influence design outcomes despite existing power dynamics that may have previously stunted those opportunities
• How methods such as the collaborative design studio can derive a wider range of insights from end users
• Demystifying participatory design by bridging the gap between old and new perspectives
• Rethinking how information is shared from a socio-economic perspective
• The benefits in shifting research from an investigation-based methodology to a more humanistic approach, such as navigating a socio-human system
• Rethinking poverty as the lack of relationships from which money flows, and how this parallel can be drawn with information/research initiatives

A Shared Language for Co-Creating Ambitious Endeavours

As designers we want to reach people’s experiences, make their lives better, and ultimately contribute to a better condition of humanity and our planet. But something is getting in our way. Instead of delivering breakthrough experiences we are relegated to feeding bits into downstream implementation and operations. The enterprises we work for make us chase arbitrary, short sighted goals, and chase after the next release. Meanwhile, the key business decisions that determine the outcomes of our efforts have already been made.

Enterprises are made of individuals forming great teams, applying a diverse set of skills, knowledge and experiences to ambitious projects. In order to bring this enormous potential to fruition, we need one thing: a shared understanding, appreciating each other’s viewpoints and backgrounds, tracing and translating decisions for greater impact on the whole.

Milan will introduce you to EDGY – a language designed to achieve just that, relying on your core skills as experience designers and information architects: understanding enterprises as systems embedded in a wider ecosystem and navigating their multifaceted nature. You’ll take away an approach for co-creating their future working with elements, dynamics and dependencies, and radically increase your impact on the outcomes they produce for people.

How DesignOps Is Adapting (or Not) to Cumulative Crises (Videoconference)

Two years of Covid and endless experimentation with remote and hybrid work models. George Floyd’s murder. And now Russia’s war in Ukraine.

We’re going to pause our “regular” DesignOps Community programming, and spend time together identifying and acknowledging a host of perplexing, unanticipated, and frankly traumatizing issues, and discussing how to get through them in the context of DesignOps work.

• What do you do when, due to a crisis:
• Your team includes people in countries affected by war?
• Your colleague is the target of bias or prejudice?
• You need to identify and find new skills or training to help your people cope?
• A critical tool or platform your team relies upon is suddenly unavailable or supported?
• The communications channels you’ve relied upon to manage DesignOps are no longer functional?
• You can’t stay positive or motivated, and you’re wondering if you should be doing something other than “business as usual”?

How have you addressed these challenges so far? What would you have done differently? And how can you be better prepared for the next crisis?

Join us as we talk about it together. Lou Rosenfeld will facilitate this community conversation, joined by the DesignOps Community curators.

You Don’t “Get” Anyone to Do Anything

Any designer who has ever struggled to implement change in an organization has asked questions like those below:

• “How do we get product managers to value user research?”
• “How do we get executives to think in an Agile way?”
• “How do we get UX researchers to prioritize our work?”
• “How do we get our sales team to stop making promises we can’t deliver?”

For product leader and author Matt LeMay, such questions are frustratingly familiar. He hears them from clients and colleagues, alike. Practitioners and leaders–in roles and on teams spanning UX, marketing, product, and more–unfailingly come to him seeking the answer to the question, “How do we get X to do what we want?”.
Matt’s answer is always the same:
“You don’t ‘get’ anyone to do anything.”
“What’s more”, he’ll add, “you’re asking the wrong question”.

Exactly what question should you be asking? All will be revealed when Matt joins us for the opening session of “Design in Product”. Building from the premise, “The path to success in cross-functional product development means embracing ego death and recognizing that you have very little direct control over anyone or anything,” Matt’s presentation will tap into the wealth of knowledge he has gained at such companies as Google, Audible, Mailchimp, and Spotify to illustrate concepts that are as practical as they are unexpected and profound.

Stick around to join the conversation and ask Matt your questions during our post-session Q+A, moderated by Christian Crumlish.

Theme 4: Better Together: Partnering with Others to Transform Enterprise

Organizational transformation is a team sport. The Hero Journeys of transformation are rarely the stories of mavericks and determination; in real life, they are the stories of successful relationships and ‘better together’ leadership. How do we find partners to support our mission and amplify each other’s strength?

Theme 4 brings together four case studies that showcase partnerships across teams, functions, and geographies. They are co-presented by functional leaders who provide different perspectives on how to build relationships and infrastructure to enable cultural change and organization-wide impact.

UX Futures: The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Design

Over the last several years, artificial intelligence (AI) has permeated the software world––from “smart reply” functionality in email to auto-completed code in developer tools––but it’s only recently that AI has been implemented into creative processes. As AI-driven functionality becomes more common in the design tooling space, questions arise––what is cool? Inspirational? Useful? And what is creepy? Unhelpful? Where is the line?

Opening Keynote: Org Design for Design Orgs

As the move to establish in-house design teams accelerates, it turns out there’s very little common wisdom on what makes for a successful design organization. Books and presentations tend to focus on process, methods, and tools, leaving a gap of knowledge when it comes to organizational and operational matters. Kristin Skinner, Head of Design Management at Capital One and co-author of Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams, will shine a light on the unsung activities of actually running a design team, the operational challenges and considerations, and what works and what doesn’t. Drawing on her experience managing design teams and organizations at Microsoft’s Pioneer Studios, Adaptive Path, and Capital One, Kristin will discuss how what happens “behind the scenes” and how a focus on design management and operations can ultimately affect a design organization’s output, quality, and effectiveness.

Enterprise UX Playbook (Videoconference)

Many of the most successful software development practices — like agile and UX — emerged in the consumer facing private sector. Think Airbnb, Spotify, Uber. But what happens when we try to map those practices onto large enterprises that typically serve internal employees rather than the public? For example, are UX’ers prepared to think about how large systems connect and interact? How about the challenges of HR and roles and responsibilities? Challenges such as these are highly relevant in enterprise spaces, and perhaps even more so in the public sector where systems are often quite old and ways of working have calcified. This talk focuses on “gaps” in Enterprise UX, and how we might seek to close them.