09.30 AM to 01.00 PM on Thursday, November 14th

In the early stages of innovation, there is often very little evidence to prove the potential success of an emerging product or service. Instead, we often rely on the loudest voice in the room – a shrewd political navigator – to build or force the internal momentum needed to get an idea to market.

Selling-in” innovation is about creating and delivering persuasive arguments. It is about telling stories that win the hearts and minds of internal stakeholders and building artifacts that allow them to see, and then advocate for, the vision on your behalf.

In this masterclass, Jon Kolko will teach an approach to building persuasive arguments and artifacts that can applied to any product or service innovation. Participants will see examples of how this has been done in Fortune 500 companies. They will be given the components needed to build the case for their new idea, and will practice selling their vision to other groups of stakeholders.

09.30 AM to 05.30 PM on Thursday, November 14th

Ushahidi builds humanitarian tools, remotely for some of the most marginalised people across the globe. To tackle these systemic problems with how to ‘open source’ a design effort and bring the community along with the, ‘on-staff’ Ushahidi designers, we’ve been piloting a series of design jams on our crisis communication tool TenFour with our partners Designit and Adobe. Together, we’re looking to solve the problems with how open source design can work by engaging through meaningful technology that makes a difference in the world.

If they weren’t aware before, how to contribute to open source as a designer and the importance of open source. Practice and be part of the Methodology and workshop framework for open design. Actively contribute a design issue to an open source tech for good product/project.

02.00 PM to 05.30 PM on Thursday, November 14th

Anyone trying to create simple design faces some tough challenges: the line between ‘simple’ and ‘dumbed down’, matching features of competitors or even ‘selling’ simplicity when it’s easier to sell features. Join this workshop to understand what simplicity means and how to measure it, how to recognize creeping complexity and strategies to simplify at every stage of the product lifecycle. Get introduced to what simplicity can do for efficiency– measuring & validating the efficiency of your product, recognizing design directions that are more efficient, and measuring the return on investment on achieved simplicity and efficiency.

This Masterclass is for product managers, designers and solution architects who want to understand how to design compelling product or implement a feature with practical exercises, rules of thumb and design tools. This workshop offers novice and experienced practitioners alike ways to see problems anew and approach them with a fresh set of rules.

09.30 AM to 05.30 PM on Thursday, November 14th

So how can you trust something that you can’t see?The way many of the decisions that artificial intelligence makes for us are completely obscured. We can either be concerned about all of it, or at some point we will need to place our trust in the invisible. We need to trust that when the technology was created, it was created with someone who had similar concerns as you do. This masterclass explores how ethics can and must be infused in designing for AI.

09.30 AM to 05.30 PM on Thursday, November 14th

Introduction:

• Is your design organization optimized to bring the most value to your end users?
• Are workflows with cross functional teams helping or hindering design excellence?
• Are your teams tooled according to their needs? Does this tooling fit will with workflow needs?
• Do you as a manager/leader have visibility into team work, so you can manage resources, quality, and team development?
• Is research operationalized to allow designers and non-designers to most easily drive towards insights?
• Does your team have a clear set of human resource guidelines from recruitment through advancement?
• Have you encouraged and empowered a culture of openness, exploration, inclusivity, and respect?
• Does your design team and your stakeholders understand how to value design practice? Can you show them how that value is beign achieved, and how your design operations practice has helped to make that value happen?

Design organizations have matured. Designers have matured. We are no longer really arguing about our processes any longer. What we are discussing now is why our processes aren’t fitting with peer stakeholders, or why just generally our processes as sound as they are aren’t getting us expected results. The conversation today needs to shift from design process (how we do our craft itself) to design operations (DesignOps), how our processes, tools, methods all interconnect together amongst ourselves and our peer stakeholders. In this course, we will look at how existing agile (lower-case a on purpose) and lean methods are a wonderful source of inspiration and guidance along with systems like DevOps to help develop a new framework that guides how design gets operationalized within and across an organization. The goal is to Amplify the Value of Design, which in turn amplifies the value design helps to create for our host organizations and their customers/users.

Goals:

• Learn the core elements of operations and how they apply to any design organization.
• Learn how to analyze your existing design operations in order to find areas for optimization.
• Learn how to design your design operations over time to evolve your organization
• Use new toolkits and frameworks to help you collaborate with stakeholders, align agendas, and plan against strategies.

Audience:

Design Leaders who are in positions of influence, who want to help their design teams become more valuable to their host organizations and their customers/users.

Product Leaders who are interested in helping their design teams excel and to close the gaps between their other functional areas.

Specific areas covered:

• Operationalizing studio processes in cross-functional teams
• Working in agile and lean processes
• Collaboration methods including with distributed teams
• Team development: Recruitment planning, onboarding strategies, career development planning, team ladder development.
• Research Operations: recruitment, data collection, insight sharing, etc.
• Communicating and measuring design and designOps value.
• Designing your DesignOps practice.

09.30 AM to 05.30 PM on Thursday, November 14th

The strength of lettering art lies in the understanding of letter forms, their shape, flourishes and texture. A monogram is an aesthetic interaction of letters and motifs. Drawing monograms provides the opportunity to learn how to observe, deconstruct and eventually compose 2-3 letterforms in a cohesive typographic style.

This workshop aims at guiding participants through a systematic process of scribbling, sketching and finally creating a harmonious hand drawn monogram. Participants will learn and explore various typographic features, type rules and best practices and deepen their understanding of type and lettering. This hands on interactive workshop is a great way to realise design possibilities without the use of computers.

09.30 AM to 05.30 PM on Thursday, November 14th

Learn how UI/UX designers can use Adobe XD to design and prototype engaging voice-enabled experiences. In this Masterclass, we provide you with a fundamental understanding of how best to create digital experiences for “beyond the screen.”

Overview:

• Learn how to build Voice User Interfaces for smart screen/Alexa devices with Adobe XD
• Leverage the power of Voice to build smart interfaces and prototypes with Adobe XD – NO coding skills required
• Preview and Test on an Alexa Echo device with Adobe XD and the Alexa Plugin”

09.30 AM to 05.30 PM on Thursday, November 14th

All too often businesses are seduced into thinking that everybody is in alignment only to realise that everybody is holding a slightly different image of the situation and the solution in their heads. Such a lack of alignment makes solving problems, making successful products, having a competitive advantage or just doing one’s best work very tricksy. This is where an understanding of design thinking, and the skills and techniques therein, can help.

The term “design thinking” has been floating around the industry since the 60s, but it was arguably IDEO’s Tim Brown who helped bring it into the public consciousness in his 2009 TED Talk. Since then, Design Thinking has been gaining popularity in the business world, thanks to prominent articles in publications like Fast Company and The Harvard Business Review. In fact Design Thinking has become so popular that many business leaders have been eschewing traditional MBAs in favour of design led programmes at The Singularity University and dSchool.

The concept behind Design Thinking itself is fairly straightforward; essentially it’s using traditional design tools and approaches to solve non-traditional—often abstract–business problems. This typically involves a combination of abductive reasoning, visual sense making, modelling, co-design, and experimentation, all through the lens of user centricity. As such, the magic of design thinking is using these tools in new and unexpected ways.

Considering all the buzz, you’ll be surprised to know that the very existence of Design Thinking is still contested, with some designers feeling there is an element of “emperor’s new clothes” about the whole conversation. They would argue that design thinking is nothing new and designers have always used their tools to solve complex business problems, so this isn’t some new form of cognition. Irrespective of the ongoing debate, Design Thinking has clearly made its way outside the design studio and into the boardroom, giving designers an unprecedented level of access and influence.

We’ll start this workshop by introducing the concept of design thinking, and digging into some of the key details. We’ll talk about the double-diamond approach to design—something you’ll no doubt already be aware of and if not, you will be at the end of this—and how this can be applied to a broader set of problems than you’re familiar with. We’ll walk you through a set of our favourite Design Thinking tools, before splitting you into groups of 4-6 people and tasking you with solving a tricky business problem.