Online workshop
Planning for Strategic Design
IAC 2020
May 12, 2020
In response to a manager’s query about how to plan products, Alan Kay famously remarked “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” His answer invokes a paradox at the heart of design: we can’t know the future, yet it’s what we design for. If we hope to practice design successfully in an era of complexity and rapid change, we must get better at planning. To start,…
Lessons from a Jazz Musician: Improvising in User Research
IAC 2020
April 10, 2020
As designers and researchers, we spend much of our time facilitating conversations – articulating design decisions, getting alignment from stakeholders, interviewing customers, and any number of other activities centered around communicating with people and actually hearing them. It comes as no surprise that to become good at this, you must actually practice the art of facilitating and listening. But how do you practice something so ambiguous and unpredictable? Like jazz,…
Low-Code Data Analysis with Jupyter Notebooks
May 14, 2020
In this workshop, we will introduce our Data Analysis Cookbooks, a set of open-source Jupyter Notebooks that can be used for qualitative and quantitative data analysis without an extensive knowledge of programming. Cookbooks provide low-code, templated building blocks for assessing and addressing data quality issues, performing simple statistical analyses, identifying correlations, and visualizing data. Our focus for the workshop will not be to make everyone a data scientist in a…
Collaborative Improv: Building Better Products Through Improvisation
IAC 2020
May 14, 2020
Flexibility within project dynamics is a key to success - be it adapting to project dynamics, client needs, or interpersonal relationships. Improvisational theater offers many constructs to “go with the flow” and build on our teammates ideas, successes, and even where we stumble. This workshop teaches the foundations of improv and provides direct correlations to UX research, design, and collaboration. Practitioners of all skill levels are welcome, and no previous…