#UXdesignevents

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UX & bagels. One of the more valuable UX sessions/workshops I’ve been to in Singapore. Not just because they had bagels from @twomenbagelhouse 😂 Really good content, structure, and conversations.

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Singapore Art Book Fair

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Olafur Eliasson spoke about his work and then some of us went with him to check out his installation. I have been to his exhibition in Seoul and from “experiencing” Rainbow Assembly, I had been wondering if I would ever get to see or engage with any of his other works. Seeing this work tonight, I could imagine what it was like for the viewers of his Ice Car installation (where viewers had to enter a freezing container, and “endure” his art). It was a particularly cold night, and the coldness stopped me (and many others) from looking at the work longer. We retreated into the nano building and chatted while sipping on freeflow hot chocolate. (This challenge of the “cold physical encounter vs the visual encounter”, was probably not intentional in this particular piece) It was interesting to watch people’s behaviour and movement - looking up and slowly navigating the space through the reflections. It was magical to share a space with Olafur Eliasson, under his own work. #olafureliasson #northwestpassage #mit #mitList #percentforart magical event organised by MIT List Art Center

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After more than 6 months of walking past this “funky ass mirror”, just realised today that it is Anish Kapoor’s sculpture.

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Monday night at IDEO. Got a glimpse into ways IDEO designers use data when designing products and services. A key takeaway was to be careful with how data is used/interpreted - that "data is not truth" or the answer, but it should be used to indicate a possible starting point. It is there to tell us what is happening, but not why. We should be hyperaware of the biases we might apply when looking at data and when we are deciding what it is telling us. Another good point was about how there may be gaps in what the data is capturing in the first place. The speakers talked about their process - early on in the design sprint, data is used to as a way to ask the right questions about user needs. And near the end, it is used to raise confidence in the decisions they make for the solution they are designing. The speakers had to be secretive about the projects they work on, but it was still great to hear about the ways they are working to enable new capabilities, interactions, and experiences by combining a human-centered design approach with the carefully incorporated use of data. #aiga #aigaboston #ideo #ideocambridge

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A good talk for people working in tech, to step back and look at what we are building, from a wider perspective – to look more closely at how it is (and could be) used, and relook the way we are assessing whether we are building something “good”. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Douglas Rushkoff talks about the current state of data and tech – how it’s dehumanising us. He also shares his hopes for the digital future. This event has already passed but the video is available online: https://tinyurl.com/drushkoff #sharingiscaring #teamhuman #MITMedialab #digitalfuture #douglasrushkoff

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An energising and stimulating Sunday at the HarvardxDesign conference - exploring all things design. The conference brought together diverse perspectives from leaders across disciplines and sectors. Organised by student groups of Harvard GSD and Harvard Business School, this year’s theme was “Social by Design”. Speakers ranged from architects, entrepreneurs, designers, computer scientists to anthropologists. They presented design ideas, processes, initiatives that encourage social trust and connection. The importance of emotional design was one of the key takeaways for me. One of the speakers mentioned that ”The social generation is not the social media generation. It's the generation that is desperate for social interaction”. This was followed by speakers who presented ideas on how to create sense of belonging and psychological safety in our products and services. Also, listening to the presentations from a UX perspective, a common theme that came up was that HOW you build a product has become almost more imp than WHAT you build. Having a sense of co-creating with the end user - instead of predicting what people want. Going from human-centred design to human-involved design – allowing this process to define what you build. #SocialxDesign #SocialbyDesign #HarvardxDesign #designconference #harvardgsd #harvardbusinessschool

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Started my Friday morning with surreal views at Impact Hub Boston and a very real talk by @ektraynor (+ organic bananas from @bostonorganics 😋). ----- “Surreal” was the theme this month at Creative Mornings. The talk was about the value and importance of sharing difficulties, in a world where we tend focus on curating a surreal image of happiness and cheerfulness. During her recovery from a major running accident/injury, Elizabeth shared her grief and difficulties through creative channels, rather than trying to hide it – and as a result, she was able to connect with many others who thought they were alone in going through similar difficulties. As a runner myself and as a designer, many aspects of Elizabeth’s story resonated with me. It reinforced the importance of making art out of d ifficult situations, not just pleasant ones. (A bit ironic of me to share such a cheerful post. But will be taking more time to think about ways to create work based on a wider breadth of emotions and experiences). Thank you to the team at @cm_boston @impacthubbos and sponsors @Adobe @mailchimp @wordpressdotcom for making Creative Mornings happen every month :) #creativemornings #cmbos #cmsurreal #creativesinboston #quickdoodles #realtalk

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Therapeutic last days of 2018 and the first day of 2019 spent in New York art galleries and museums. Feeling consoled and (a bit cliche but) inspired.

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Ranjitha Kumar’s work overlaps a lot with what we do at our company. I was already familiar with her work in fashion search/discovery, and in this talk, I learnt about some new directions in her work: “interaction mining” (some things that are more directly applicable for UX design processes), and “taste mining” (an interesting approach to fashion discovery).

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She introduced tools that her team has built that are super useful for smaller companies and UX teams that don’t have the time and resources to run large scale user tests. It’s like open source usability and usage analytics, making data driven design more accessible - allowing more designers to leverage data to build better products.

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She also briefly talked about the similarities between data-driven design thinking being applied to product design and ML design. I left making a note to learn more on how to apply design skills and techniques to ML driven tech. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

#HCI #UX #datadrivendesign

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A presentation and fireside chat led by Gorham Palmer (Design Principal of IBM Interactive Experience) and Alex Carr (Creative Director of MAARK). Such valuable, practical advice on UX processes. Thank you @aigaboston for arranging this! Both speakers come from a Graphic Design background. The most valuable part of the talk for me really was just hearing from and seeing successful UX designers talk about how relevant Graphic Design was in their path to moving into UX and Design Strategy. They also spoke about the key skills (soft skills and technical skills) they developed on the way and gave solid direction on what they look for in a UX designer. ⠀⠀⠀⠀ #uxdesign #interactiondesign #experiencedesign #ibmdesign (at IBM Interactive Experience Design Lab)

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Started Saturday morning at MIT Media Lab, with a small group of design-oriented-women-in-tech. Today we participated in design thinking exercises for the problem of doors and also problems of emotions in the workplace. By walking around the building with more sensitivity and with closer observation, we came to realize that there are a LOT of problematic doors. One person mentioned that she actually stopped studying in the “quiet study room” because of the amount of noise the door makes every time someone enters/leaves the room. Related to the topic of emotions in the workplace, someone mentioned that MIT has a “map of places good for crying on campus”, which I thought was a great idea. We also had a design thinking exercise about design thinking (very meta). Some points we came to agree upon were that design thinking involves a lot of assumption-busting and requires a curious attitude towards the problem and who it affects. We also talked about the iterative nature of building something through design thinking and how it requires tolerance towards ambiguity. We also touched on the importance of getting everyone in on this mindset at a pre-building, brainstorming stage. #designthinking #experiencedesign #designattitude #womenindesign #womeninux #mitmedialab

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Grateful for all the learning opportunities in Boston. So far this month, there have been two talks at General Assembly Boston - one on “The rise of the corporate innovation labs” and another was a panel discussion with designers in business leadership roles. It’s super helpful to be in a room with more experienced designers talking about what they are doing, sharing ideas, and giving advice.⠀⠀⠀

What the two talks had in common this month, was the importance of cross-team collaboration. Another point that resonated with me was the importance of keeping one foot in the business side of things, but also continuously asking what we are trying to solve for who (maintaining a user-centric design attitude).

Also mentioned during these talks was the recent McKinsey report on “The business value of design”. (There have been other designers who have criticised this report along with another McKinsey article on “Ten design practices”, for oversimplifying and trying to find and define a formula for something that is meant to be more organic. But I think there are some good points and is worth a read). ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

#uxdesign #experiencedesign #brandexperience #generalassembly #designers #gaboston

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HCI lecture series at MIT. John Stasko spoke about the value of visualisation – how the way data is packaged can create opportunities for exploration and initiate insightful questions. He gave an interesting example of how visualisation helped make a certain dataset so accessible, communicating the essence of a situation with such clarity – that the same data, which had previously had no impact when presented poorly, suddenly became controversial. The talk was geared towards talking about the importance of design and the crucial role that visualisation plays in presenting and representing data. Surprised and delighted to see a computer scientist speak and think with such sensitivity to design and visualisation. Added to this, he gave interesting examples of how the clever use of interaction can be embedded into the data visualisation to organise and communicate information. It was really interesting to observe this from a UX/UI perspective. #HCI #DataVisualisation #UX #design

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I keep having these moments where I feel like I am in a sitcom. This evening I went to a design book club. Doodled this in an attempt to record and remember the few hours I just had, sitting in a restaurant on a rainy weeknight, with a total group of strangers. Most were designers. My focus was drawn to (and delighted by) the guests some of the designers brought with them - a father had come with his two shy twin girls that both ordered the same cheese pizza; and a design professor came with her schizophrenic husband who started singing every now and then.

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Learning how much technical precision and care is required for producing craft at scale.