Session type: Pre-Conference Workshop

More of our lives are happening online every day. We interact and transact through digital systems on a growing variety of devices. More understandable and coherent systems = better experiences. As a result, information architecture (IA) is more important than ever.

In this fast-paced workshop, you will learn the basic concepts and practices that lead to the creation and management of effective information architectures.

Historically, design practices have focused on process, methods, and craft. But this limits design’s potential—design leaders can provide more value to their organizations by implementing robust DesignOps. In Design Operations Essentials, Dave Malouf will introduce participants to the three lenses of DesignOps, and how each one helps an organization increase the value it gets from its design practice. Participants will learn frameworks from strategic thinking and service design so they can start developing their own operational models for their design practices.

Who this is for

If you are in the early stages of implementing design operations practice in your organizations, this workshop will teach you both a broad and flexible definition of design operations as well as tangible activities for how to start.

What you’ll learn

• How to create a plan and execute DesignOps for managing teams—from recruitment through promotion and even off-boarding
• How to develop assessment criteria to evaluate and select current software for supporting design operations
• How to develop methods for optimizing workflows
• How to integrate DesignOps roles and responsibilities into the wider design organization

Increasingly, our work is about more than just one app or website; we’re challenged with tackling whole ecologies of digital, physical, and blended interactions. Meanwhile, technology is making it harder every day to achieve coherence and clarity from touchpoint to touchpoint. It turns out, the best way to design for everything everywhere is to start with the fundamentals: how do humans really perceive and take action in their environment?

The Understanding Context workshop takes you deep into new ways of seeing the building blocks of human experience, with ideas and methods that will change the way you think about designing for humans. Spend a day going deep into making sense of making sense, by exploring and modeling the experiences around you.

In this workshop, you will:

• Learn basic and advanced concepts about how humans interact with physical, semantic, and digital information.
• Get on your feet and explore the real world around the conference venue, gathering data for analysis.
• Collaborate in teams to analyze and model the contexts you encounter, and devise ways to make them better.
• Get new ideas about how to make things make more sense, whether you’re doing web design, service design, or interaction design.

This workshop is suitable for practitioners at any point in their careers. Just bring a desire to explore and an open mind!