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.

Convergent Research Techniques in Customer Journey Mapping

Magic Lab does not believe that insight is owned solely by the insight team. We would like to share a case study of how we brought together four different functions to undertake a customer journey mapping and needs prioritization exercise. This work leveraged hybrid market research and user research methods, as well as the expertise of our community and behavioral analytics teams. For good measure it also gained understanding from democratizing the research process. We’d love to share what we learned about how to (and how not to!) bring teams together and empower non researchers to be involved.

Full-Stack User Experiences: A Marriage of Design and Technology

Age and Interfaces: Equipping Older Adults with Technological Tools (Videoconference)

According to a survey by Pew Research Centre, seniors are the demography least inclined towards digital applications, and face significant barriers in equitable access to the internet.

Designing for the infrastructures of everyday life

Asking after the dynamics of artificial intelligence’s extraordinary recent rise recalls Hemingway’s famous line about going bankrupt: “In two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” That combination underscores the emergence of many technologies, of course. It creeps up on us, and then is suddenly moving at speed, everywhere. This makes it hard for cities and places to work with the grain of tech, in order to produce equitable or sustainable outcomes. Although we rarely do it, tech asks us to step back and ask the deeper questions lurking behind all the noise.

In this talk I’ll describe how everyday technologies, digital and physical combined, define how we live together; how they tend to articulate what we stand for as a society, or how our cities work — and what’s on the table now. Drawing together inspiring projects and cases ranging from Norway to Japan, and from new cities to reimagined regions, I’ll suggest how we might align design practices in order to address our contemporary shared challenges, like climate breakdown, social cohesion, and sweeping demographic changes. As AI moves beyond shuffling playlists or improving grammar and starts coordinating mobility, energy, and water systems, or how housing is allocated or buildings are made, we must rapidly figure out how design, governance, and community best understand and take advantage of these new distributed, decentralised and collaborative technologies. In doing so, we might well challenge our preconceptions of technology, economy, and community themselves.

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto: Mapping Robotic UX with Carla Diana

UX looks at the interaction between products and people. But smart technology often leaves one user out in the cold: the robot. Lou chats with Carla Diana, a hybrid designer, author, and educator to discuss why smart tech is only as good as its interactions with people.

Carla is speaking at To Be Designed, our future and tech virtual conference on April 25.

We’ll Figure That Out in the Next Launch: Enterprise Tech’s Nobility Complex

(Originally titled “Making Uber More Efficient through Informed International Insights”)
Every design decision has the potential to include or exclude customers. Global Research emphasizes the contribution that understanding user diversity makes to informing these decisions, and thus to including as many people as possible. User diversity covers variation in capabilities, needs and aspirations. At Uber, the Global Scalable Research program is intended to influence product teams at HQ and around the world, to design and test in global regions: currently Mexico, India, Brazil. In this talk, I’ll discuss how we use Global Research to prioritize what product teams really need to build well and understand if their designs have relative ease of use that translates well to non-US users. Our Global Research priorities addresses some of the most challenging problems facing our global users today.

“Let’s Talk About Data and Crisis”: Public Digital Service Delivery = Open Data + Human Centered Design (Videoconference)

The public relies on government services during critical and meaningful events throughout their lives—from birth, travel, education, and healthcare to retirement and death. The global COVID-19 pandemic inevitably impacted these critical functions of our lives, and underscored the need for increased government technology and communications.

Digital platforms have proved to be key and effective agents in delivering critical and urgent information or services in the event of a public crisis, as opposed to physical infrastructure (imagine Dr. Fauci posting a paper bulletin to convey the latest national statistics for COVID-related data!). On the other hand, both private and public entities rallied around open data initiatives to inform critical policy decisions, share information, and work together to develop critical digital infrastructure that provided testing sites, kits, and results (e.g., call centers vs websites; office visits vs telemedicine).

To fully scale solutions such as these, we must first consider how we:

1. Use data to inform our technology in solving problems;
2. Provide assistance in a timely and approachable manner for end users; and
3. How we use data to invest in critical features and to quickly deliver information.

Making Conferences More Accessible with Darryl Adams, Intel’s Director of Accessibility

With the surge in popularity and need for hybrid and virtual events, Lou sits down with Intel’s Director of Accessibility, Darryl Adams, to discuss how technology can make in-person and virtual conferences more accessible and inclusive to speakers and audience members with disabilities. He also speaks to how accessible conference design can be improved and fine-tuned for speakers with disabilities, and help those without disabilities feel more comfortable presenting. What kind of accessibility principles and design factors should conference hosts consider for audience members with disabilities and those without disabilities when setting up for in-person and virtual events? How does this technology increase engagement and diversity in attendance? Listen as Darryl and Lou touch on all these topics, and more.

Darryl Adams recommends: Demystifying Disability by Emily Ladau

“Could you make it worse?” Redesigning HealthCare.gov

A self-described “failed architect,” Sha Hwang joins Lou to discuss the challenges of scale when merging two companies, and his journey from Trulia and Stamen Design to being part of the team that rescued Healthcare.gov and, subsequently, founding Nava, a public benefit corporation formed during those efforts.

Sha Recommends:
Civic Technologists Practice Guide www.amazon.com/Civic-Technologis…ide/dp/1735286508

Sha will be speaking at Design at Scale 2021 this June 9-11. rosenfeldmedia.com/design-at-scale…/the-lost-year/

About Sha’s talk, The Lost Year: The pandemic made it painfully clear that the failure of critical public services causes real harm, both physical and financial. Our healthcare system is being overwhelmed, millions are pouring onto unemployment, and we’ve seen an unprecedented number of people trying to access government programs. It has never been more important for government services to be simple, effective, and accessible to all, yet we’re far from that vision today. In this talk, Sha Hwang, co-founder and chief operating officer of Nava Public Benefit Corporation, will discuss the opportunities designers have to build government services that prioritize equity and resiliency—and the responsibility that comes with designing systems that serve millions of people.