Day 1: “Go beyond yourself”
Notes from Day 1 at #IXD15. How to get past yourself as a designer? The values & challenges of the individual. (I aim to share notes from days 2 and 3 in the near future.)
IXD15: Day 1 Mon, Feb 9
Morning Keynote: Jan Chipchase
Jan Chipchase doled out some tough love by reminding us to consider the following:
- Don’t believe the hype. Interaction design will not save the world. We are a young profession and need to maintain a rigorous level of self-critique.
- Risk-taking tends to decrease the larger the group. Think about the risks startups take vs how risk adverse established agencies or corporations tend to be. Think of the creatives risks a small group of designers will make vs a large agency with billability ratios and large payrolls.
- Longevity vs. Impact. What great things have been created in the past 10 years? What size group did those things? Other examples: How relevant is the work of a creative studio done over 40 years compared to the individual creation of someone working for 40 years? Ten years? Three years? One year?
- The money you turn down defines you as much as the work you take on.
- Beware the differences between what organizations Say and what they Do. The “gutter between consultant as change agent and corporate sell out is littered with bonuses and broken dreams.” Organizations spend more time celebrating their social impact projects because: those often are the the projects agencies have permission to publicly talk about, it increases the perception of the agency’s impact and is a great recruiting tool.
Social impact projects, however, tend to make up the smallest amount of work an organization does. The rest is an uneasy proportion of projects that are: “commercial and align with company values,” “commercial and against company values,” and some even “commercial and against society” (the latter he enouraged each organization to define for themselves). - Understand where you are on the learning curve. Do you consider yourself “at the top of the arc” because you organize and speak at interaction design conferences? What constitutes mastery? As his awareness grows, Jan (humbly of course) places himself increasingly at the bottom of the arc. There is so much to learn!
- Learn how to design design experiences. His go to process lately, are “Popup Studios.” At least 4–5 day close intensive with a not to0 small, not too large cross functional team away from the typical, ideally immersed in the environment they hope to design form. It’s important to foster flow for teams. You also need to build in decompression and synthesis for the popup team before they return to regular life.
What is the MVI (minimum viable infrastructure) to cultivate great design?
I left this talk smiling at Jan’s tough love stance and heartened to reflect on the power I have as individual to create great things.
Keeping the Vision Alive: Techniques for Communication Throughout the Project Lifecycle
Design for Context, Lisa Battle and Duane Degler
IA and UX firm in DC, works with large institutional and government clients. (full slides: http://www.designforcontext.com/publications/keeping-vision-alive-ixd)
This talk inventoried the project management tools or living artifacts Design for Context uses for institutional and government projects. These tools benefit: Executives, Projects Leads, and Team Members. When: at the start, middle, and end of a project — they serve different purposes at those times.
Executives need tools they can understand, use and adopt. They need the vision and direction communicated in a way they understand as an audience (so they can make decisions) and in a way they can internalize and then be a spokesperson to their peers and leaders. Otherwise, project success is at stake.
User flows are useful because they visualize pain points and complexity. Can help decide what to prioritize.
Roadmapping gives them the tool to see what happens when (and what already happened when). The language used in a road map also educates executives about the design/development process. It introduces them to terms they will hear throughout the project. The visualization of focus over time helps executives know when different things will be addressed and when not to worry about them.
Project Goals that map to features (or put another way, features only exist to serve a clear goal or need) can reduce scope creep;getting buy-in on the how to achieve goals is also part of this.
A Project Timeline that provides a historic perspective and intentions for the future can help capture progress, movement and build confidence that this can happen.
Some of this felt like inviolate “waterfall” documentation, but I also understood the value on large projects when high level stakeholders come in and out of a project. The right visual can re/ramp people and reduce repeat conversations. I will consider the timeline to capture project history and track momentum.
I agreed with having a Vision Wall (or whatever you want to call it). One of the values of a Vision Wall: provides an “ambient surrounding of your decisions” so people don’t lose focus or forget how they got to a certain place. The lack of a common physical space and vision wall is one of the challenges of working in distributed teams. However, on projects some projects I just duplicated the wall in two locations and kept them relatively up to date.
Feature Summary was a text table the helps “middle managers understand overview and changes over time” — especially for people who manage many projects and need a quick visual reminder where this particular project is, and why things are being built. That way they can offer their most informed stakeholder buy in or problem solving solutions. The features in the summary are keyed to user story numbers in the backlog, which takes you directly to the agile command center.
What tools or strategies are valuable when working as external consultants? Design for Context mentioned these tools are only valuable as a “leave behind” if they are adopted and maintained by the team.
They parted with these tips to thrive as an external agency working with client projects:
- Story telling is a strong strategy.
- Nurture champions.
- Decide what documentation is most useful for particular project.
- Understand and map out clear dependencies.
- Provide manageable steps.
- Create visible alignment across all the groups.
- Keep docs as tools.
- Develop Personas and Scenarios as a group exercise to ground the internal team.
- Help team map out a decision tree to clarify processes.
Panel Discussion: Designing for a Developing World
Panelists
Luke Wroblewski (Director of Product, Google)
Patrice Martin (Founder, IDEO.org)
Nate Bolt (Ethnio, former Design Research Manager at FB)
Gaby Brink (Founder, Tomorrow Partners)
Alexander Baumgardt (VP of Global Design, d.light design)
Elizabeth Laraki (Manager of Product Design, Facebook)
Moderator:
Nathan Shedroff (Currently Chair of Design MBA at CCA)
A well meaning panel that modeled how other western designers try to be self-aware when working on these types of projects. The following two questions distracted me for most of the panel:
1. What do we mean by Developing World? Problematic phrase. “Emerging Markets” is tough too because it implies the value of a consumer over user.
2. How can you have a panel at an international design conference on designing for the “developing world” with no one represented from these worlds? Any forum that requires the speakers to use the terms “them” and “they” the is problematic. If this were a panel on “Designing for women” we would never (I hope) have a panel of all men speaking to that, no matter how knowledgeable.
However, what I did value from this panel. Notes:
- Remember to be aware of internal biases. Collaborate with the users you design for (participatory design). Don’t over analyze and over optimize localization if you don’t need too.
- The panelist ranged from data-informed designers of huge systems with international audiences (Facebook, Google) to ethnographic designers researching onsite with the primary audience.
- With big product platforms, sometimes best to build an open-ended platform and “let people establish their own norms” — Luke W.
- During the Q&A portion of the panel, three audience members spoke up who are from “developing nations” or “emerging markets.” Their questions and insight were welcomed by all. A woman who is running the first interaction design masters program in Costa Rica spoke about the challenges of “technological manifest destiny” vs HCD. A gentleman from Venezuela posited that the “western world” could benefit from the values that the “developing world” offer: namely, the value of frugality and focusing on the underserved (as in populations low in services and servicing).
- That last point was a question I had as well: How can we learn from other cultures, economies, “worlds”? Why does wealthy, western design set the bar for design values?
- What are we doing as an industry to encourage (or fund) native design practices?
- What’s the difference between “social impact design” and “emerging markets design”?
- The panel reminded me I had met an industrial designer from Ghana last year at a San Francisco meetup. He was finishing a fellowship at Stanford and shifting his career into software development. What had he been doing in Ghana before coming here? Inventing how to build affordable fire extinguishing solutions in rural and near urban areas. In that part of the country, it would take at least an hour for a fire truck to arrive at the scene of a fire.
Next year I would like people like him, and the other folks in the audience to be on that panel!
Ending Keynote: Kara Swisher, Re/Code
Ribald, ascerbic. Controversial. I found Kara Swisher’s edge refreshing. She gave you something to react to, something to get a hold of to calibrate your own point of view. Kara confessed her talk had originally been prepared for a gathering of news professionals. I liked she was dropped outside perspectives into the design enclave.
10 Trends Now
1. The Buzzfeedization of All
2. Ubiquity=Promiscuity
3. Brandtastic or You Are Who You App
4. Geo and Sensor Driven: There is No Where to Hide.
5. Always On: Continuous Partial Attention.
6. Authenticity: Does the Online Agree With the Offline?
7. Immersive: Wearable Wearables
8. Data Everywhere: Drowning in Information
9. Radical Transparency: There is No Exit
10. Soylent Green is People, People!
(You can also go here to see tweets and images from these presentations. This is Kara’s)
