Thoughts on design, strategy, and innovation.

« The Appification of Things: Smart Attributes | Main | Design Planning Before Design Process »

Speaking Engagements in 2012

I’m excited to announce a three new speaking engagements scheduled for me over the remainder of 2012, in London, Chicago and Delhi, respectively.

First off, I’ll be be speaking in London at the August ProductTank meetup on Wednesday, August 15. ProductTank is a group which produces a global series of collaborative, user organized “unconferences”, focused on Product Management and Marketing topics. London was the first and is the largest currently active group.

The topic for the night is Strategic UX, featuring me and two other speakers. Mike Atherton, Head of UX at Huddle, will talk about branding for start-ups from a strategic and UX perspective. Leisa Reichelt, UX Consultant, coordinates the London UX Bookclub, UX Bootcamp and UX Tuesday (accessible UX expertise for startups) will talk about Strategic User Experience. I am considering a redux of my 3 Myths of Customer Experience talk given I’ve had a load of positive feedback on it. Alternatively, I may share some thoughts on how Strategic UX relates to product portfolio planning. I’ll finalize this over this weekend. There will then be a short panel discussion and Q&A with all three speakers. If you haven’t signed up yet, it would seem you’re out of luck as all 120 spots are taken with a wait list of 148.

David modeling
Then-student David Kodinsky, modeling

Second, I’ve agreed to travel back to Chicago to teach Rapid Experience Modeling at the IIT Institute of Design this October as a one week intercession course. I’ve taught the class the past two years and my students’ feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Rapid XMOD is an immersion course focused on “Experience Modeling”. This critical part of the practice at the Institute of Design differentiates the school and is core to design-led innovation. The course is “Rapid” because there is an emphasis placed on developing a comfort with quickly creating different experience models–both heuristic and generative–to describe the world, problems and opportunities. Models are created each day on a particular “Aspect of the Experience” with heavy critique and discussion in class and in smaller group sessions. The ultimate goal is to push students to be more confident in describing and illustrating the “Experience” from all critical perspectives. To teach the course, I will be in Chicago for the week of October 15 - 19. Ping me if you’re in Chicago and are interested in meeting up.


Fellow IIT Institute of Design ProfessorAnijo Mathew speaking at CII-NID 2011

Finally, I will be keynoting India’s largest design conference, the 12th annual CII-NID Design Summit scheduled on December 13 & 14 December 2012 in New Delhi. The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) has been organizing the CII-NID Design Summit for the past 11 years with National Institute of Design (NID). It is a powerful platform that attracts participation from design houses, design institutes, policy makers, media, and industry from India and internationally. It looks to be an inspiring and stimulating global forum set in the Indian context. “Design Doing” is the central theme of the 2012 Summit. I plan on bridging the “Thinking” and “Doing” gap with a discussion of how different approaches, including Hybrid Agile, Test & Pilot and Lean Start-up can all be effective in managing risk and producing ground breaking results.

While in India, I am also excited to be a juror for the 2012 CII Indian Design Excellence Awards. It is only the second year of what will surely become an important recognition of design talent in the second most populous nation on planet Earth. Check out last year’s winners .

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.creativeslant.com/cgi-bin/blog/mt-tb.cgi/75