UX Australia Conference 2019

UX Australia is a 4-day conference about everything User Experience.

Here’s a summary of the key takeaways from the conference.

Overview:

• Design is always political, even when we choose to ‘not be political’ because the power structures in place are designed to include some and exclude most. We need to start identifying, acknowledging and questioning these structures as a core principle of our design practice.
• We have responsibilities to design with, not for people, and work towards enabling everyone the power to design for themselves.
• All emerging technology will be absorbed by UX and we will be responsible for creating the experiences, so it’s important we understand the fundamentals of designing with these new technologies.

Key takeaways summarised by Rohan Irvine

Designing for the Future

We have a responsibility to build good things that benefit society. You’re responsible for the ethics of what you design.

Designing with a future focus needs a particular disposition

• Short-term vs long term focus of client and outcome or solution
• Quality and role of inputs, especially in scenario development
• Ability to imagine alternative futures and the means to visualise them

Avoiding business as usual

Foresight tools and processes before strategic positioning or planning or design

• Use different, longer time horizons
• Ask better questions: not what are we designing, but why and what impact it will have
• Encourage multiple perspectives
• Foster divergent thinking

Small Technology

Whoever controls data controls the world.

We have a surveillance capitalism problem where the wealthy know a lot about you and you know virtually nothing about them.

This is People farming.

• As designers, we need to build frameworks, tools and decouple our technology and design systems from organisations that exploit our information.
• Small technology are everyday tools for everyday people designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profits.

Speaker: Aral Balkan — Cyborg rights activist

Designing for Disability and Vulnerability

• Disabled people are the original life hackers because they are forced to navigate a world that was designed to exclude them.
• Disability is a creative practice, not compliance.
• Design thinking credits the thinker. Thinking is elitist. Let’s turn Design Thinking into Design Questioning. If you start making disability studies a part of all design schools when students graduate they won’t think they’re designing for, they design with.
• How do we design for vulnerability for the benefit of everyone? We need to design holistic services that take vulnerability into account.

Liz Jackson — The Disabled List

Designing for ENDS.

Ends bring opportunity to reflect, take responsibility, make actionable change to improve the ills of consumption.

We need to create complete lifecycles.

The intent for the business
An open conversation that inspires collaborative effort in actively controlling and concluding the life of the product or service.

The intent for the consumer
Consciously connected to the rest of the experience through emotional triggers that are actionable by the user in a timely manner.

Speaker: Joe Macleod

Other Speakers:
Chriss Noessel — IBM
Andy Polaine — Fjord
Tea Uglow — Google Creative Lab

It was an amazing two days full of thought provoking content. Our next step as designers is recognising how to integrate this into our daily roles.