UX Week

  • Location
    San Francisco , Unites States
  • Attendance
  • Travel
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15th edition of the UX Week. UX Week is a mixture of engaging keynotes and informative workshops from leading professionals in the field of UX design. UX Week is for design professionals. from all over the world to get inspirated and building new skills.

Talk abstracts from the speakers


  • Alla Zollers
    Leadership Coach & Culture Designer, We ♥ Work
    Talk Title: Culture Design
    Talk abstract: One buzzword people mention almost everyday is “culture”, as in our organization has “strong” or “creative” or even “toxic” culture. But what do people mean when they say this and does it really have to do with free lunches? Now, what if if you wanted to design the culture of your organization, how do you start? And do you need to have a fancy title to be influential? This talk will provide designers at any level with a concrete framework to define, conceptualize, and begin to design the culture of your team or organization.
  • Andrew Lovett-Barron
    Fellow, Technology in the Public Interest, New America
    Talk Title: Design and Defense
    Talk abstract: In the early 20th century, future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis argued that “able lawyers have, to a large extent, allowed themselves to become adjuncts of great corporations and have neglected their obligation to use their powers for the protection of the people.” This sentiment, amplified by civil rights activism in the United States in the 1950s and 60s, evolved into Public Interest Law – a subset of legal scholarship that directs the practice and tools of law to benefit the marginalized, the vulnerable, and the underrepresented. In the past few years, I’ve seen product and service design practice moving along a similar vector – having had the privilege of working beside other societally-minded designers at the US Digital Service, watching as colleagues at IDEO.org applied design in fighting poverty, and collaborating with design-led social enterprises fighting to do good in the world. But these teams of designers are still too few. It’s time to follow the lead of the legal profession, and lay the groundwork for a viable and attainable career path in Public Interest Design. I’ll talk about the existing Public Interest Design ecosystem, what being a fellow at New America looks like as we help build a Public Interest Technology ecosystem, and what steps you can take as a designer to work in the public interest.
  • Elizabeth Buie
    Senior User Experience Consultant, Sigma Consulting Solutions Ltd
    Talk Title: Beyond Flow: Design for Transcendent Experience
    Talk abstract: Flow is a familiar experience among designers: we become deeply engrossed in a challenging activity, losing track of time and feeling completely in tune with what we’re doing. We may even experience transcendence — a deep connection with something outside ourselves, something greater and more permanent than ourselves. But what is transcendence? Is it just an aspect of flow, or is it something else altogether? What’s distinct about transcendence, and why does it matter? And how do we design technology to facilitate it? (Can we actually design for transcendence?) Transcendence shares some key features with flow, such as focused attention and altered senses of time and of self, and the experiences differ in some fundamental ways as well. Researcher Gayle Privette captures one major distinction: transcendent experience “is mystic and transpersonal”, and “flow is fun”. Transcendent experiences elude description and resist planning: we cannot define or anticipate them reliably but can only invite them. This renders inadequate the direct approaches of classic UX work: we must instead take an oblique approach. Design for transcendent experience requires new methods. Elizabeth will explore in this talk the nature of transcendent experience — contextual elements that can foster transcendence, the kinds of perceptions and reactions that can constitute a lived experience of transcendence, some words we use to characterize a transcendent experience, and the impact such an experience can have on our lives. She will describe and illustrate some tools and methods that she developed during her PhD research on design for transcendent user experience. Finally, she will invite the audience to try out one of the tools.
  • Elizabeth Sampat
    Game Design Lead, SYBO Games
    Talk Title: How Designers Get Their Groove Back: Fall In Love With What You Do (Again)
    Talk abstract: We can be our own worst enemies. Sometimes, we get a lousy assignment as a freelancer; other times, we're just brought low by the news. And it's easy to wonder: does what I do REALLY matter? Drawing from psychology, design principles, and her own career experience, Elizabeth Sampat explains how to do the best work of your life by changing your perspective.
  • Erik Dahl Researcher
    Strategist, Designer, Independent Consultant
    Talk Title: Seeking Suffering through Ultrarunning
    Talk abstract: Running is just one foot in front of the other, and with the appropriate training, you might be surprised what the human body can do. Our daily lives are filled with assumptions about what is and isn’t possible. As UX designers, we spend much of our days making life easier for people and reducing friction in their lives. However, is there a place for stress, struggle and suffering? Are there unintended consequences of the work we are doing? Where is the balance between comfort and stress, ease and obstacle? What is the boundary between the natural and designed world? Growth and adaptation occur only through the application of appropriate stressors on systems. Over the last several years, I’ve been running trail ultramarathons as a way to introduce stress and adaptation into my life, and to re-connect with the natural world. In this talk, I’ll introduce you to the world of ultrarunning (any distance beyond 26.2 miles—typically 50k, 50m, 100k, and 100m+), and through stories of exhilaration and suffering, I’ll give you a taste of what it’s like to push your body beyond the limits of what you might have thought was possible.
  • Gene Kogan
    Programmer and artist
    Talk Title: Learned interfaces
    Talk abstract: Traditionally, user interface design is a process that helps people learn how to intuitively operate their machines. What if instead we framed it as a process of helping machines learn how to accommodate their operators? This talk will address the future role of machine learning and artificial intelligence in building next-generation human-computer interfaces, and demo new tools for automatically analyzing, organizing, describing, and visualizing large-scale multimedia data.
  • Marsha Haverty
    Experience Architect, Autodesk
    Talk Title: Acting naturally: why design needs ecological psychology
    Talk abstract: As humans, we are good at engaging different kinds of designs with different kinds of actions. Flexibility is in our nature. Yet, there’s something fundamental about us that makes our experience with a design feel natural, or…distinctly off. This talk draws on ecological psychology for insights into how the nature of human behavior impacts experience at this deeper level, and what an ecological approach offers us as designers. We’ll look at ways to tune our designs to our nature so that, however they manifest (back-lit screens, holograms, talking aloud, or any other mode that comes along), and whether we engage them intermittently or rely on them for our usual behavior, they feel not only useful and clear, but exquisitely human.
  • Molly W Steenson
    Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon School of Design
    Talk Title: In Defense of Architecting What is it with the word "architecting?"
    Talk abstract: Ask architects what they do, and they will say that they design. Ask UX designers about the work of designing a system, and they often call it "architecting." It's a word that makes architects cringe, but that UX designers embrace: architecting is the practice of making complex things simpler and more straightforward. In this talk, I will trace the tensions around architecting through the work of architects like Christopher Alexander, Richard Saul Wurman, and Nicholas Negroponte, and the ways that their collaborations with cybernetics, cognitive science and artificial intelligence brought systems architecture to bear in ways that seem very familiar today. In the word "architecting," I'll trace the deep history of UX design, one that unites architects and artificial intelligence, and that goes back some 50 years.
  • Roman Mars
    Host + Creator, 99% Invisible
    Talk Title: 99% Invisible: Looking Closely at Broken, Ugly, and Exclusionary Design
    Talk abstract: 99% Invisible is a radio show and podcast about all the thought that goes into the design of things we don’t usually bother thinking about. There are tons of valuable lessons to be learned by noticing the beautiful and seamless design all around us, but it’s also pretty fun to look and laugh at the broken stuff too. 99% Invisible host Roman Mars will perform a live podcast, with interview clips, music, and sound effects with stories about the broken design that makes us laugh, the ugly design that makes us cringe, and the immoral design that excludes people, maybe without us even knowing it. And we’ll also have an example or two of the good design that inspires us to do better.
  • Peter Lewis
    Head of Commerce Product Design, Capital One
    Talk Title: Design as Citizenship: a Neighborly Approach to Design Ethics
    Talk abstract: Like miners in the 19th-century gold rush, we designers flocked to product design and interactive media in pursuit of personal passion, career growth, and a chance to make the world a better place. Promised the opportunity to “make an impact”, we created experiences that shaped society—sometimes in small ways, sometimes on a massive scale. Sometimes in ways we never anticipated or intended. We designers are ordinary people who have found ourselves with extraordinary influence—a relatively small group making decisions that affect the lives of millions of users. But how do we know whether our work will change the world for good? Where are the boundaries of our responsibility? Every design decision is ultimately about what kind of world we want to build, and what’s good for the people we share it with. And to wrestle through those questions, we need to slow down, learn to see ourselves through the lens of community, and dedicate ourselves to the ancient pursuit of wisdom.
  • Tim Jenison
    Chairman of the Board, NewTek, Inc., NewTek, Inc.
    Talk Title: Painting a Masterpiece and Other Geek Hobbies
    Talk abstract: I Don't Recommend Tim Jenison, a Texas based inventor, attempted to solve one of the greatest mysteries in all of art: How did 17th century Dutch Master Johannes Vermeer ("Girl with a Pearl Earring") manage to paint so photo-realistically -- 150 years before the invention of photography? The epic research project Tim embarked on to test his theory was as extraordinary as what he discovered. Spanning eight years, Tim's adventure took him to Delft, Holland, where Vermeer painted his masterpieces, on a pilgrimage to the North coast of Yorkshire to meet artist David Hockney, and even to Buckingham Palace to see a Vermeer masterpiece in the collection of the Queen. Tim’s quest became the subject of the acclaimed documentary, Tim’s Vermeer. At UX Week, Tim will discuss living with a case of incurable “Vermeereal Disease,” and the engaged curiosity which enabled him to survive all manner of peril, including frustration, boredom, and a near poisoning by carbon monoxide.
  • Caryn Vainio
    Lead UX Designer, VREAL
    Talk Title: Bridging Two Worlds: Adapting to VR Design
    Talk abstract: Virtual Reality is a design Wild West where two schools of thought dominate: use traditional design that people recognize from the world of 2D, or mimic reality in three dimensions as much as possible. But is either path really the best way to go? What can we pull from the fundamentals of UX design in 2D and how can we apply them to a new world that includes a third dimension?
  • Anna Pickard
    Creative Director, Voice and Tone at Slack, Slack
    Talk Title: Design Dramaturgy.
    Talk abstract: Designmaturgy. Or: "Everything I needed to know about writing for software I learned in drama school." Taking from a long career spanning butterfly milking, theater, imaginary cats, and professional music video criticism, Anna will delve into how being in the mindset (or just employing) of poets, playwrights, artists, comedians and old shoes can bring new insights into the way we engage users. And yes, old shoes have mindsets.

Speakers

  • Roman Mars
  • Caryn Vainio
  • Anna Pickard
  • Tim Jenison
  • Camille DePutter
  • Gene Kogan
  • Elizabeth Buie
  • Molly W Steenson
  • Isabelle D'Arcy
  • Marsha Haverty
  • Peter Lewis
  • Jessica Outlaw
  • Jorge Arango
  • Whitney Hess
  • Boon Sheridan
  • Boon Sheridan
  • Kendra Shimmell
  • Iran Narges
  • Jess McMullin
  • Alastair Somerville
  • Peter Merholz
  • Karen McGrane
  • Matt Nish-Lapidus
  • Alla Zollers
  • Ethan Marcotte
  • Cornelius Rachieru
  • Scott Sullivan
  • Elizabeth Sampat
  • Andrew Lovett-Barron
  • Erik Dahl

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