Data, Ethics, AI Oh My!
Join this workshop for a mix of hands-on activities and thought-provoking discussions about the creation, use and impact of models that fuel AI. By creating your own (analog) algorithm, learn how leading design companies like IDEO integrate data science as a creative discipline and make it an integral part of human-centered design. This self and industry reflexive workshop will also help you with a framework to consider your own personal ethics code when it comes to data, design and AI, and provide a peek into the ethics principles of a variety of companies such as IDEO, Microsoft and IBM that help individuals, designers and companies navigate the thorny ethical waters of developing intelligent products and services.

For workshop timings, check Schedule.

Utilising Frameworks for Responsible Data-driven Design
Technology has begun to appreciate the value of user-centricity that design brings. Data science has also evolved to start influencing design for good. But somewhere on our ride towards mastering the crafts of design & data we, as technologists have missed out considering bigger implications of our work. The distress caused by the lack of responsible thinking in technology is a reality today. Can you feel that distress too?

What can you do now to assess and mitigate risks for a more responsible future? How can you apply guiding principles of responsible design in your core features, products, platforms? How can you question & reflect on data-driven design decisions from your day-to-day practice that could otherwise have powerful unintended consequences?

This workshop will leave you empowered with a responsible design framework that spans across the product development lifecycle. It will help you forecast the impact of your work on multiple dimensions of humanity.

For workshop timings, check Schedule.

Insights that Elevate: empathy, strategy and ethics
Is audience empathy enough to make our insights actionable? Meeting customers where they are is important, but in many cases, staying there misses an opportunity. Rather than simply bonding with our audiences in their state of fears or needs, our work can cater to and bring out their strength, joy and curiosity.

This session begins with 3 types of listening skills – affective, structural and dialogic – that boost our understanding and enable us to reframe insights in a way that elevates our audiences from their pain points to their empowerment. We will practice deep interviewing, insight generation and composing strategies that reach, bond with and strengthen the psychoemotional parts of our audiences that we intend to call forward.

For workshop timings, check Schedule.

Ethical User Research
Commercial agencies and studios, especially those specialising in human-centred design, rely on user research as an invaluable part of their practice. However, unlike participatory research which, when conducted in academic contexts is necessarily governed by institutional ethics, industry-based user research often isn’t conducted in accordance with any explicitly defined ethical frameworks.

This conversation is particularly vital in India as we consider the needs and practices of the demographic referred to as the “next billion users”. Learn about, and address, issues regarding user privacy and data, as they become especially urgent in the light of controversies around human rights violations at the hand of designed technological interventions.

This participative workshop will aim to clearly discuss ethical research covering aspects of informed consent, full disclosure, privacy and data protection, sensitive information, etc., and co-create guidelines and frameworks to help you shield current and future users from unintended and unforeseeable harm.

For workshop timings, check Schedule.

Facing the Challenges of Remote Work
On the surface, remote work seems appealing because it offers more freedom and autonomy but we rarely talk about the hard parts. In this workshop, we’ll dive into scenarios where working remotely presents unique challenges for designers and the companies they work for. This will be an interactive session, so be prepared to collaborate with your fellow attendees!

Little Stories That Move Big Products
A browser, the centrepiece of digital life, is probably the most used application on computers everywhere. How do you stay ‘user-centric’ when everyone is a user and user segments are so different from each other? This workshop will focus on storytelling as a tool that can translate user value into reality throughout the various stages of the product-building process.

This is a 4 part interactive workshop with collaborative exercises for the participants, equipping them with a set of practical tools across the user experience and product management spectrum. Join us for some hands-on learning in the powerful product thinking and storytelling techniques and frameworks, such as the ‘Jobs To Be Done’, User Journeys, Hassle Maps, Story Matrix and various solution prioritisation methods.

Create and manage a design system to quickly scale your work and maintain consistency across surfaces. Add components, linked assets, and other design elements for team members to reuse or riff on as needed. Every element links back to the system, so you can encourage creativity while controlling changes. Keep all your designs and team members in sync by connecting XD to Jira Software.

Rapid UX Research for Innovation
What is user research and how can you integrate it in your design process to test concepts against actual needs quickly and effectively even when resources are limited? Learn simple and easy research techniques which you can use anywhere and everywhere.

Get hands-on utilizing rapid research techniques to answer key business questions before you build anything through journey maps, behavioral personas, segmentation and mental models.

Elevating Design as a Business Practice
Is design just a vertical function that makes products and websites usable and beautiful, or can it solve higher organisational problems? Learn tools and strategies that help you see design through a different lens, and find ways to tie seemingly disparate efforts back to the organisational goals, collaborate with teams and make design-led decisions for tangible business impact.

A Designer and a Data Scientist walk into a Bar
It is believed that the term – ‘Data Scientist’ – was coined as recently as 2008. ‘Design Thinking’ and ‘Design’ have also gained mainstream acceptance only in the last couple of decades. As human-centred design continues to evolve, what would the Design process and mindset look like in a post-data-science world? What ‘sacred cows’ of the Design world will we designers have to let go of, to explore and embrace the next generation of Design? What design principles will help us unlearn and re-orient ourselves to the world where decisions will be heavily influenced or impacted by data science and artificial intelligence? What methods & tools will help us bring the best of both these worlds together?

This workshop will be facilitated by a design leader and a data science leader, both from Fractal. The intent will be to share real-world case studies, learnings and behind-the-scenes look at some of the ways in which designers and data scientists can collectively transform the way we make better decisions and solve the most complex problems.

All the things that your chart should not be
Line charts that don’t show change across time, pie charts with eight different categories and colours, 3D bar charts with shadows – they are all things that should not be. We look at bad charts and try to figure out how they miscommunicate so that you start creating data visualisations that communicate effectively.

We will spend some time with the key elements of data visualisation – the ways we encode information, chart junk, data to ink ratio and annotations. In a hands-on exercise, we then walk through several bad charts and give them a makeover – reducing the junk and increasing the information.

Future Frequently Asked Questions
Imagine yourself in the future, your real future self in the real future, not that imaginary perfect utopian or dystopian place, but the normal future. What will be your real daily future issues, with your real future things? What will go wrong? What will be unclear to you? What would you like an answer to? In this workshop, we will explore some of the main tools and approaches of speculative design and design fiction. Stretching our minds to create future timelines of the evolution of some everyday objects and designing not the object themselves, but the future frequently asked questions that might emerge from them.

End-to-End Product Design Stories for Enterprise

Storytelling is a key tool of design. At its simplest, a story is people with desires doing stuff to achieve goals. For example, a classic storyline is boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. The boy and the girl are the people, the stuff they do is meet, break-up, and get back together. And the goal is finding true love. In enterprise design, stories are often not so simple. In enterprises, hands-on users are driven by stakeholder demands and organizational goals. They operate in teams with complex workflow interactions. Enterprise stories are epic journeys.

This workshop will take you through the process of end-to-end storytelling for enterprise design. We will practice wrapping the end user experience into the context of customer organizational goals and product team market objectives. We will craft stakeholder personas and organizational structures that influence hands-on users. We will ensure our stories represent the whole journey: from learn to try to buy to use to grow. And we will apply lessons from neuroscience about how people perceive, think, and feel to make our stories compelling and memorable.

Abrar Burk & Yashna Jhamb, Ooloi Labs

Problem solving through rapid prototypes & lean experiments

Over the last decade, while studying and working in the field of design, one of the big problems we’ve seen people face, (and have faced ourselves) is crossing that hurdle from ideation to the act of ‘making’, and realizing the idea as a functioning ‘something’.

More recently, with the advancement of available tools and technologies, building and deploying solutions in various contexts is now possible in extremely short spans of time. ‘Thinking with your hands’ allows one to make-test-iterate from the very beginning of the design process, making the next steps and decisions a lot more informed and contextual. At our company Ooloi Labs— that builds socio-technical solutions for social impact organisations— this approach of staying lean, building early and testing ideas from the get go, has been an approach that we’ve integrated into our work philosophy

Do you need a rebrand?

Understand brands and their relationships with their users. What makes them great and how to build systems that last. This workshop will leave you with a framework that helps you identify the need for a rebrand, and how to get started making a case for one. The tips and tricks that will take you through the first and the most important steps of a rebrand and beyond through hands-on exercises and deep design discussions.