March 19 - 20

LX: Leading Experience 2018

Location
San Francisco, United States
Attendance
Travel
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The LX: Leading Experience Conference is for anyone leading the design and delivery of great experiences. Business services are becoming increasingly complex, and the position of designers is evolving. Our roles include driving change at scale, considering the ethical implications of emerging technologies, and organizing practices that reflect interdisciplinary teams and skillsets to deliver better outcomes for businesses and people. Whether you’re a manager or inspiring from inside your team – at LX you’ll start from within, elevate your cause, and make it happen.

Speakers Talk Abstracts

Antionette Carroll

Founder, President and CEO, Creative Reaction Lab
Talk: Design + Equity: Design Leadership for Community Change

Design is an invisible innovation that continues to change the world through visual, spatial, and experiential means. Why not use this process to change our neighborhoods, communities, and, ultimately, the human experience for the better? Through equity-centered community design, creative problem solving, social innovation, empathy and humility, designers and community members alike can improve global difficulties and challenge human rights and social justice issues. Hear Antionette Carroll, the Founder, President and CEO of Creative Reaction Lab, discuss how August 9, 2014 and Ferguson, MO changed her from a typical 9-to-5 graphic designer to a social entrepreneur, facilitator, community organizer, and social impact design advocate; the lessons she has learned so far on her journey; and how design (and you) can create social and community transformations. This talk will explore the need and opportunity for merging "design" and human equity to address historical and contemporary designs that have built and amplified chronic oppression for a variety of communities - big and small. Also, this talk will provide tips on how to become an equity designer in your work and life.

Cap Watkins

VP of Design, Buzzfeed
Talk: How to VP

A very common question I get, whether at a conference, on a panel or even from people I work with at BuzzFeed, is what my day-to-day work is like as a VP of Design. Since no one week or day is exactly the same, I've historically had trouble answering this question. No more! In this talk, I will detail a full, actual week of being a VP of Design at BuzzFeed, along with some lessons I've learned in my role that I've found to apply broadly to leaders across all levels of an organization.

Patricia Moore

President, MooreDesign Associates
Talk information coming soon

Lauren D. Russo

Managing Director & Creative Executive Coach, The Creative Executive
Talk: The Humanity of Creativity

The most daunting hurdles that design leadership presents are human ones. How can you live up to your creative potential, and get others to live up to theirs, when you barely have time for all of the items on your to-do list? How you can generate creative outcomes differently based on the tools you already have? How can you better tap into the true underlying needs and desires of the people for whom you’re designing experiences? Whether you’re leading your organization’s efforts to deliver better and more creative outcomes at an increasing scale, or, you’re on the ground floor of the creation, design, and delivery of those outcomes, the complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity, and volatility that you’re solving for are all human elements. What will keep you more than simply “in the game” amid all this complexity is being more adamantly human-centered. Being human-centered in your design leadership means knowing how to better leverage the “human-ness” of yourself, your team, and the community you design for. It’s about digging deeper into that complexity, without losing sight of bigger picture. This talk will share the characteristics of effective human-centered leadership, from communication to motivation. Empowering leadership on every level encourages people to reach for their highest potential. Every person, no matter what level they are in their organization, is capable of building on their own potential and the collective potential of their community, by elevating their understanding of how to work with people and their human-ness, instead of working against it.

Michael Conti

Creative Manager, Define American
Talk: Starting a New Immigration Conversation

If someone tries to convince you of their point of view, inevitably, they will tell you a story. When statistical points fail, human brains love anecdotes as a means to illustrate a larger narrative. The immigration narrative is no exception. For years, politicians, activists, and individuals have poured countless hours and hundreds of millions of dollars into storytelling about immigrants. But what happens when we pass the mic? The national dialogue has been invariably shifted by undocumented Americans coming forward to acknowledge their legal status, and call into question a national identity that prioritizes papers over patriotism. But harnessing this power is not simple. How does one preserve the truth of an individual's story, while making it digestible for the public? How does one encourage individuals at risk of deportation of posting a photo of themselves? What happens after they share their stories, will they fall on deaf ears? We will be exploring the ways Define American has tried to bridge this conversational divide in America.

Cori Schauer

Service Designer, City & County of San Francisco Digital Services, Northwestern University
Talk: Small acts of service make big differences

To be aware of people’s needs, to be humble enough to ask about those needs, and to be strong enough to act on those needs—that’s being of service. And it’s the job of a leader. But, how do we serve and lead at the same time? And without losing our own voices? I’ll share answers to these questions, lessons learned from my time working in very different worlds of the tech industry and city government, and discuss how you can incorporate small acts of service in your leadership work that will make big differences in your relationships, and move you closer to a service mindset.

Corinne O Takara

Artist and Arts Educator, Okada Design
Talk: Imagining the Future of Shared Urban Spaces

Who are we? Where are we? Our public spaces must invite us to engage with each other to discover and articulate these answers. At their core, vibrant public spaces lure with both the possibility of the discovery of something new and the comfort of the familiar. As we move into a future of greater societal fragmentation and demographic changes, how do we honor the merging and colliding stories of our rapidly shifting communities? Hybrid private/public spaces and community found public spaces will serve greater and greater roles as community gathering hubs. As we move into a future with greater economic disparity, educational fragmentation, and ethnic diversity, how might we imagine public spaces to serve a wide range of community needs? How might we create new ways of direct engagement and personal connections across broader sectors of our communities in these spaces? This talk will explore ways we can create opportunities for the public to explore and shared ideas for what public spaces can be, and who we can be in them.

Peter Weng

Chief Business Officer, Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute
Talk: Introducing Mindfulness for Emotional Intelligence in Leadership

In leading complex, fast-moving organizations, the ability to process emotions effectively is critical to allow individuals and teams to thrive. This session will provide an introduction to mindfulness practice as it relates to developing emotional intelligence. This will include: - The science of neuroplasticity, emotion, perception and behavior change. - The role of attention training in enhancing mental focus and developing emotional intelligence. - A guided meditation and application on how to use mindfulness practice to develop greater resilience, sustain peak performance, and cultivate overall well-being

Stephen Goldmann

Consultant / Entrepreneur, The Culinary Edge
Talk: Design Leadership Lessons from Michelin Starred Kitchens

Great design can be inspiring and gripping. It has the power to shift the way we view and interact with reality. But Great Design is also beautifully practical, grounded and quickly impactful. Designers are all challenged to re-invent, re-imagine and solve problems that range from highly complex to seemingly simple and mundane, and we are asked to do so quickly, efficiently and with few resources. Looking to food as a design medium brings us to a space where art and this immediate practicality of measurable results meet. Designs results here are quickly measurable, highly dynamic, subjective, expensive and perishable. Top kitchens from Paris to Beijing share their own subtle processes for creating a transportive experience, and ground us in unexpected universal design tenets.

Erin Hoffman-John

Designer & CEO, Sense of Wonder
Talk: The Game is Never Done: Design Leadership Techniques from Massively Multiplayer Game Design

You know “gamification”: transform obligatory tasks into “fun” motivational ramps using techniques from games. But it didn't really come from games. (Capital One is a bit closer.) Behavioral science is a powerful tool, but this session will focus on deep game design techniques that the video game world uses to generate lasting, evergreen motivation. We’ll also dive into creative collaboration techniques used in game development to wrangle talent, the better to create awesome products.

Alida Draudt

Futurist, Capital One
Talk information coming soon

Jaymar Cabebe

Network Operations Lead, Gigster
Talk: Designing for a Distributed Work Experience

With an ever-growing share of the workforce looking for flexible, distributed, project-based work, organizations are increasingly engaging remote freelance talent to augment their efforts. This is especially true when dealing with fast-evolving technical areas that are tough to insource. In this talk, Jaymar will explore questions that many ask in the face of this change, like: How might we design our organizations to optimize for collaboration with this kind of workforce? How might we create an experience that’s tailored to its needs (and wants)? Jaymar will share some of what he’s learned in building and working with Gigster’s global community of freelance developers, designers, and product people.