Speed Talks
Five-minute speed talks were one feature of the conference. The concept was good -- an open invitation to submit a presentation with a panel of judges to select the best. The results were spotty; all of the presentations had good production values but about half of the topics were trivial (to me). Here are my notes on three of them:
"Adventure Research" - ask a not-entirely together homeless person to give you a tour of San Francisco. "What's All This Fluffy Stuff?" - there was a story wanting to be told but she didn't tell it. "Steampunks" - this is so 1980's; these are some nice ideas for furnishings but why do we have to be subjected to one person's fascination with another couple's fantasy life?
Speed talks that did pay off for me were Lawrence Swaider's presentation of a project to rebrand birth control -- how to package the message for teenage women today; Lorissa MacAllister on using cross-functional teams in healthcare design; and Arturo Pelayo's conjoined twin presentations: Design is Diplomacy.
Arturo was very rude in bundling two presentations into one, chewing up so much time that a later speed talk got bumped from the schedule. But I really liked his first segment where he challenged designers to answer for the social and environmental impacts of their work. The second part was a feel-good piece about empowering children to engage with their community.
The last useful speed talk was on Brains, Behavior and Design. It discussed patterns of irrationality that have implications for design -- for example, losses have more impact than gains; the present counts for more than the future. The project team designed a paper-based toolkit to help designers reframe a solution to better influence people to the desired decision. See BrainsBehaviorAndDesign.com for more information.
Don't Forget This!
We learned that Patricia Moore pioneered the use of disguise to directly experience the target population's reality (see video clip). And we were reminded about the book, "Black Like Me", another pioneering work in this vein.
We got the phrase "New York Verb" and some negotiation advice from Dominic Misino - find out as much as you can about the person; call them by the name they want you to use; find out what's important to them by asking them what they want; know your own bottom line and walk-away point; make them specifically promise, as in, "I promise I will do X, Y, Z".
Ikea Effect - if you do it yourself, you love it more. Heather Reavy called this out as a strategy for getting business buy-in for a design solution. Only rough things out enough that people can imagine possibilities. Big bulletin boards of sticky notes help to surface insights. Frame ideas in words. Balance a description of the feature / solution with evocations of values and aspiration. Leaving space to imagine possibilities gains advocates.
You can see videos of all (almost all?) of the conference presentations on Vimeo, click here for the list.
Earlier I posted some links about design research in China. This is the definitive article, to date: Consumerism in the Wild, Wild East.
The Panel that Wasn't
The ID conferences that I've attended in the past few years have usually concluded with panel discussions. This seems like a good idea and no-brainer to pull-off but usually there's something a little flat and artificial about them. There are generally some decent summary statements or reiterations of key positions but genuine conversations with sparks, ah-has! and gotchas! never really develop. A skillful moderator can bring some tricks to deflate talking heads and lessen the participants' sense of being the equivalent of performing seals - but what do you do when the selected moderator is a talking head himself?
My favorite tweet about this year's panel went something like this, "And now the panel finally gets to talk and ohhh, we're out of time!"
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