EVOLVE— emerging dynamics in design thinking practice
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Registration + Breakfast
Welcome to DTX8!
The Riddle of Design Thinking
Sebastian Fixson
Synopsis: Design Thinking is a puzzling phenomenon. It uses principles, practices, and mindsets from professional design, yet professional designers often despise it. Academic researchers study design thinking from various angles across a variety of disciplines, yet they have difficulties to agree on what design thinking is. Management consultants sell design thinking as a powerful way for any organizations to become more innovative, yet it is surprisingly difficult to establish design thinking as a general way of working in most established organizations. In this talk I will lay out the landscape of design thinking in both academia and practice, point out some current trends, and close with some speculations about design thinking in the future.
The Logic of Story
Byron Wilson
Synopsis: Humans are storytellers. We make sense of the world through the use of story. We package our seemingly non-linear and fragmented life experiences into manageable stories that allow us to make evaluations and understand the complexity of our lives. This tendency is akin to an internal language that seems to be embedded in our biology. As with all language, there is a risk of information loss due to both its degree of accessibility and translational precision. Identifying this risk presents an opportunity for contributing healthcare stakeholders to better understand and meet the needs of our fellow storytellers. As the need for healthcare to evolve swells to a fever-pitch a story-based design approach can offer relief by rooting our work in the art and practice of storytelling.
This talk focuses on the logic and significance of incorporating more story-based concepts of execution and communication in the practice of design within (but not limited to) the healthcare industry. While the mechanisms that drive an effective story are often difficult to understand and can elude the most capable of expert, Byron will provide two examples of recent professional design work that illustrate the use of a story-based approach for creating new value in healthcare.
Morning Tea Break
Making Government User-Centred
Kara Kane & Martin Jordan
Synopsis: The Government Digital Service (GDS), part of the Cabinet Office, has been leading user needs-driven digital transformation of the UK government since 2011. Now, there are about 3,500 user-centred design professionals working in the public sector to redesign services that impact the lives of millions of people. Kara Kane and Martin Jordan will talk about how this work started, how user-centred design is embedded in organisational values, ways of working and processes today, and what challenges lie ahead. Kara is the user-centred design community lead; Martin is the head of service design at GDS. Their team looks after the design and user research communities of practice across government, designs and delivers training, and supports the understanding and capability building of user-centred design on a local, national and international level.
Lunch
Pecha Kuchas
Talks from Gigi Kalaher, Bettina Maisch, Sydney Meyers, Sarah Herbert, Jan Schmiedgen, & Jeannie Foulsham
Transferring Design Beyond the Classroom Through Reflective Design Practice
Adam Royalty
Synopsis: Everyone has their own unique design practice. It develops from a mix of training and personal experience. This session will share examples of how a novel reflection tool prepares students to apply what they learn in school to the real world.
Microinteractions for the system: design in the age of techlash
Sarah Gold
Synopsis: Sarah will talk about how to design accountable and trustworthy services, especially when there aren’t obvious user needs - but there are really important systemic ones. Includes examples of interfaces from IF’s work and jokes about architects.
Afternoon Tea Break
EVOLVE Panel
Panel moderated by Alana Wood
Synopsis: A discussion around emerging dynamics in design thinking practice
Closing remarks
Free Time
Dinner at various locations across the city
Please refer to your dinner ticket
Breakfast
Welcome Back & Day 2 Agenda
Accelerate the Adoption of Service Design
Virginia Hamilton
Synopsis: The Ontario Innovation Hub developed a set of tools to understand how to spread design thinking in government. Virginia Hamilton will lead an interactive session using these tools and we will talk about ways you can use them in your organization.
Morning Tea Break
Project ATLAS: Expanding access to “best-in-class” care into remote communities
Chelsey Wickmark
Synopsis: Leveraging community engagement to bolster speed to market for innovations in the delivery of VA telehealth services to hard-to-access populations of veterans across the US.
Lunch
Mindsets, Values, and a Design Thinker's Blind Spots
Ingo Rauth
Synopsis: "It all starts with having the right mindset. Most people don't get design thinking, and we need to help them develop the right mindset.
Do you agree? Let's debate that. In this interactive session, we will look into what mindsets are, what informs them and how they get into our way.
The aim of the session is to discuss mindsets as a way to uncover blind spots that might be in our way of taking the next step as individuals, employees, and as a community"
Building Creative Confidence
Alwin Put
Synopsis: Co-creation is all about mindset and team. In this work session we try to understand how different people approach the creative process differently and how you can adapt your own approach to improve creative collaboration.
Afternoon Tea Break
When there's no U in UX…
Matt Jones
Synopsis: Designing systems that have AI agents within them requires us to think beyond 'traditional' user-centred approaches. This talk will outline (with some examples) new approaches through research, concepting and more detailed design we've explored in the last two years of R&D work at Google AI.
Closing remarks & next steps
Entrance
Central Saint Giles building
16-17th September
The Google Central Saint Giles building is located close to either Tottenham Court Road Station via the Central or Northern Underground Lines or by Covent Garden Station, taking the Piccadilly Line.