2020 Pre-Conference Workshop
Description
There are many challenges to shipping successful product and service innovations, but “having a good idea” is rarely one of them. Instead, one of the biggest roadblocks to bringing a new innovation to life is telling the story of the innovation in a way that is charismatic, compelling, and persuasive. To help a company drive towards a north-star, team members and stakeholders need help imagining a new vision of the future, and understanding why that future is valuable. This storytelling is fundamental to design strategy: it’s a way of selling-in innovation.
During this hands-on workshop, facilitators Jon Kolko and Matt Franks will introduce a three-step process for bringing an innovation to life in a way that drives alignment and generates groundswell. This process includes:
– Building a succinct and concrete value proposition
– Drawing a new, optimistic vision of the future
– Structuring and telling a persuasive story
It is helpful, but not required, if participants have experience:
– planning, conducting or managing ethnographic research
– working with (and feeling the pain of) groups with varying, and often contradictory, perspectives and ideas.
– creating rudimentary drawings and sketches
About the speaker(s)
Jon is a Partner at Modernist Studio, and the Founder of Austin Center for Design.
He was previously the Vice President of Design at Blackboard, the largest educational software company in the world. He joined Blackboard with the acquisition of MyEdu, a startup focused on helping students succeed in college and get jobs.
Jon has also held the positions of Executive Director of Design Strategy at Thinktiv, a venture accelerator in Austin, Texas, and both Principal Designer and Associate Creative Director at frog design, a global innovation firm. He has been a Professor of Interaction and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he was instrumental in building both the Interaction and Industrial Design undergraduate and graduate programs. Jon has also held the role of Director for the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), and Editor-in-Chief of interactions magazine, published by the ACM. He is regularly asked to participate in high-profile conferences and judged design events, including the 2013 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards. He has taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the Center for Design Studies of Monterrey, in Mexico, and Malmö University, in Sweden.
Matt is a Partner at Modernist Studio. He was previously a product owner and creative director at Blackboard. He is also an instructor at Austin Center for Design. His work focus includes social system design, mobile systems for both handsets and tablets, entertainment experiences for TV, web, and video, and strategic design thinking for large-scale system design and product rollout. He’s been awarded patents and a silver IDEA award for Target’s ClearRX bottle.