UX Week 2018

Talk abstracts from the speaker

• Hannah Beachler, Production Designer

  Diversity and representation in fictional futuristic landscapes
  How do fictional narrative future landscapes affect and represent our realities and present experiences? And how does the past play a significant part in those experiences? Production designer Hannah Beachler will discuss how design becomes a part of the changing landscape of diverse and inclusive spaces and, representation in futuristic landscapes. She will talk about her design process and the unique way she uses history, tradition and cultural elements to create diverse and inclusive spaces and environments in her work. She will show a visuals presentation of reference images, illustrations, set photos, and film stills, that illustrate how she connects the past, present and future to create unique environs in narrative film. Most recently, Beachler designed Marvel’s Black Panther for director Ryan Coogler, which just became the 3rd highest grossing film in the US, and the 9th highest grossing film worldwide of all time. She previously collaborated with Coogler on Creed (2015) and Fruitvale Station (2013). Prior, Beachler partnered with director Barry Jenkins on the 2017 Best Picture Oscar-winning film, Moonlight, and designed Beyoncé’s stunning visual concept album Lemonade and took home the 2017 Art Directors Guild Award for Excellence in Production Design for Awards or Event Special and earned a 2016 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Production Design For A Variety Nonfiction Event Or Award Special.

• Roman Mars, Creator + Host, 99% Invisible

  99% Invisible: Design is in the Details.
  In this live audio podcast Roman will tell stories with sound and music about the small innovations that solve big problems and just make life more delightful and interesting.

• Catt Small, Product Designer

  We're all Designers
  Product design and development often involves many people with different skillsets. Unfortunately, communication problems can arise. Designers may hear responses that sound like "you're the designer", "that'll take too much time", or "that's not my job" when they attempt to collaborate. Catt Small, a Product Designer and Developer, will discuss methods used to cross silos in order to speed up the design and development process while also building camaraderie, agency, and transparency. She will also discuss ways to encourage teams that may be reluctant to change and ways to get upper management on board with a more collaborative design process.

• Jorge Arango, Author and Design Consultant

  Living in Information
  Digital systems — such as Facebook, Wikipedia, and your bank’s website — are more than products or tools: They create contexts that change the way we interact, think, understand, and act. In many ways, they function like places. This presentation gives designers of such “information environments” conceptual tools to help them created products and services that better serve our needs.

• Liz Jackson, Founder, Inclusive Collective

  Designing With Disabled People
  The life of a disabled person is spent cultivating an intuitive creativity that allows us to navigate a world that is not built for our bodies. It is a level of design thinking that is rarely tapped in the design community. Yet, disability ingenuity has led to such ubiquitous designs as the bicycle, the iPhone touchscreen and curb cuts. Liz Jackson will discuss how she supports brands who are interested in reaching disabled consumers. Why she advocates alongside her peers to shift the disability narrative. And the value of building pathways into design for disabled people.

• Bryan Lee Jr., Founder / Design Director Colloqate Design

  Design Justice: Building Power
  The profession of architecture and urban planning has established a process of design that creates tremendous environments for the those of means and wealth, while having a neglectful eye towards the potential oppressive consequences for those without. We will explore the privilege and power structures that define the built environment since Americas inception. We will look at how organizing, advocacy, and design Justice work bind to racial, social, and cultural equity around the world and how the theory of design justice can continually advocate for the dismantling of privilege and power structures that use architecture and planning to create systems of injustice throughout the built environment. Like all institutions, Design imposes its power through policies, procedures and practice and is subject to its own inherited biases. The lasting permanence of our professional decisions, requires us to pay particular attention to the injustices that result from our work and to seek Design Justice wherever possible. Architecture has the power to speak to the language of the people it serves, we as designers, are at our best when we are willing to serve the people without power.

• Lining Yao, Assistant Professor Carnegie Mellon University

  UX Design with Morphing Matter
  With programmable and morphing materials, we are bringing information and user experiences out of the computer screens and into the real world. In this talk, research practice from Morphing Matter Lab at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute will be shared, with the goal of inspiring the future UIs enabled by adaptive and autonomous materials.

• Vahid Jahangiri, Deputy Director, International Lifeline Fund

  Her Name is Betty: Beauty by Design
  Her story is one of millions that are an inspiration of transformation for us all: a living example of community and self-actualization. Left to entropy, Betty was interminably marginalized. After the 10-year war in Northern Uganda that claimed the lives of thousands including her husband and close family members, Betty suddenly became a single mother of seven. As a seamstress in the rural North, Betty could barely cover the costs of charcoal to feed her family, let alone pay their school fees. Like millions of other mothers around the world confronted by insurmountable odds, humans like Betty are the birth of solutions. Human evolution is intimately linked to fire & water, therefore we at Lifeline design and produce fuel-efficient cookstoves to navigate one of the most basic and intimate aspects of this lived experience: the act of cooking. Introducing new technologies and/or methodologies requires skills well beyond a technical point of view. We humans are the only species on this planet who cook our food. It is no wonder that over 2 billion people still use firewood or charcoal to build the fire that sustains their lives. But this reliance on woodfuels is killing us. Deforestation, sickness and death from household air pollution, abuse from firewood collection, and loss of valuable daylight hours are just a sample of the burdens trapping billions in a cycle of poverty. To be specific, we re-iteratively distilled these elements into our approach: The fundamental details of cooking - from cuisine type, to pot size, to traditional culinary habits - that together inform the design process of our stove technology; Designing the market entry and distribution approaches to introduce the technology to post-conflict and developing communities; and Evaluating the “user” centric experiences to build a trusted feedback loop that we use to translate the reality of our successes AND failures into further action. Because of this design model, since partnering with Lifeline, Betty has become one of the most successful stove vendors in her community. And Betty’s is a story we need to act on, not just reminisce about at a Sunday bar-b-que -- for humanity’s sake! Connect with me on twitter and help Lifeline co-design a world that moves from scarcity to abundance by design.

• Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Principal & Author, Technically Wrong, Rare Union

  Designing Inclusive Products
  Most of us start projects with good intentions—we want to make things welcoming, seamless, and maybe even fun to use. But too often, toxic cultures within tech result in products that have all sorts of biases embedded in them: “smart scales” that assume everyone wants to lose weight, form fields that fail for queer people, résumé-reading algorithms that are biased against women, image-recognition software that doesn’t work for people of color. As tech becomes increasingly central to users' days—and intertwined with their most intimate lives—UX folks have more responsibility than ever to consider who could be harmed or left out by their decisions. In this talk, we’ll take a hard look at how our industry’s culture—its lack of diversity, its “fail fast” ethos, its obsession with engagement, and its chronic underinvestment in understanding the humans it’s designing for—creates products that perpetuate bias, manipulate and harm users, undermine democracy, and ultimately wreak havoc.

• Claudio Guglieri, Creative Director, Microsoft

  HOME: A talk about our everyday relationships with digital interfaces
  “Home” is a talk about users’ digital life and designers’ roles in shaping them for the best. Home, understood as “the place where one lives permanently as a member of a household” is no longer a physical space for a vast group of people. Many of us find comfort in digital environments and use them for work and leisure and sometimes support. This talk aims to dig deeper into that relationship over time and discuss the key factors that will help designers keep and improve that connection between their products and their users.

• Laura E. Hall, Puzzle and Narrative Designer; Founder Timberview Productions

  Caring for Players in Real World Spaces and Beyond: Lessons from Escape Room Games
  Escape room games, immersive theater, live puzzle hunts, and other playful, real world experiences are wildly popular across the globe, developing in parallel with the emerging technologies of virtual and augmented reality. In this session, Laura E. Hall discusses the history of escape room games, how a puzzle is created, and how designing for these spaces utilizes human cognition and psychology to develop real-world experiences that offer not only entertainment, but immersion and transportation for players.

• Julie Carpenter, Research Scientist, Accenture

  Dark Patterns and the Ethics of Robot Design
  When design fails, there can be enormous consequences, such as physical and emotional harm to people. And, when technology design defies the legal system, organizational policies, or even informal cultural norms, it can also become something negatively newsworthy, destroy public trust, create destructive consumer connotations for a company, and disappoint shareholders and clients. In other words, designers hold a lot of power and design is a domain of great responsibility. Robots are part of a human-technology system we understand is culturally unique in many ways. For example, it is still relatively uncommon for someone to have had real life experience interacting with a robot, yet many people believe they have a common understanding of what a robot interaction might be like—and base their expectations of a robot’s design and behavior and abilities—not on real experience, but on science fiction cultural touchstones. Sometimes, these misaligned expectations cause people to overattribute intelligence and abilities to the robot beyond the real scope of its true functionality, which can cause overreliance or disappointment in a system. Additionally, robots, as mechanical tools, can be dangerous in their physicality, functions, or in the context in which they are used. Yet, research also shows that in some situations, people tend to treat robots in social ways, similar to a pet, another person, or as an extension of Self. Furthermore, sometimes people develop affection for or emotional attachment to robots, which leads to special considerations developers must contemplate throughout the design process. In this talk, Accenture Labs Digital Experience research scientist Dr. Julie Carpenterwill discuss specific ethical issues and challenges of robot design, what human factors are unique to robot design considerations, and how we can approach design with values and morals.

• Lisa Gelobter, CEO and Co-founder, tEQuitable

  From The White House to #metoo, Harnessing Tech to Power Social Impact
  In the age of #metoo, the impacts of bias, discrimination and harassment in the workplace are recognized to be immediately harmful to the individual, but also have a long-ranging effect on the economic prosperity of entire disenfranchised populations. From the White House to tEQuitable, Lisa will be exploring how technology can be harnessed to solve this and other issues that especially target communities already in jeopardy. From healthcare.gov, to veterans, students and immigrants, if we can send a Tesla Roadster into outer space, we can surely fix the critical issues affecting huge chunks of our population right here on our home planet. Lisa will use a User-Centered Design framework to demonstrate how the same practices of invention and innovation apply when creating technology for good.

• Monika Bielskyte, Founding Partner, Futurist ALL FUTURE EVERYTHING

  User experience is human Experience
  In this talk, Monika Bielskyte will share her experiences in designing the SciFi worlds for the entertainment industry and how it affects the real-world technological development and specifically, the way we think of user experience and interaction. Monika will focus on the lack of creative and emotional experience within the futuristic technologies in dystopian visions Hollywood produces, and the urgency for all of us to work in changing that, as the immersive and experiential media space - virtual, augmented and mixed reality - becomes the dominant media space in the decade to come.