The Tough Nuts in Remote Design
Dear Design Community Worldwide,
While some design teams have practiced remote design for a long time, the majority of us only recently had to face the challenge of working remotely in their teams, alongside users, and their clients.
Albeit the level of adoption to designing remotely varies wildly on a global scale, many best practices have been developed and shared within our community, and for the most part, we’ve more or less adjusted our work behaviour to the demands of this new world.
Yet we have discovered tasks that feel close to impossible to conduct in a virtual work environment. At our next event, we’d like to fill in those blank spots, and we’re inviting Ashley Lukasik, Jim Kalbach, Ana Domb, Marie Gosal and Hany Rizk to share with us some of their most recent challenges in short inspirational talks, and to lead our collective brain to identify solutions for some of the toughest nuts in remote design in subsequent breakout sessions.
Join the global design community online on April 29th from 4pm CEST (Berlin time) to improve remote design beyond the obvious pain points. All workshop results will be documented and shared publicly afterwards.
More than usual, this event requires your active participation for it to work. We need your input to help us prioritize the problems we want to tackle as a group. If you haven't done so yet, please take five minutes to complete this survey well ahead of the event.
Once again: this event starts at 4pm Berlin time, so please block the time in your calendar now. Just bring your whole team and manager along with you.
We’re looking forward to doing some groovy remote brainstorming alongside you!
Yours,
Audrey, Jay, Kathryn and Thomas
Rethinking Immersive Experiences
Ashley Lukasik, Founder at Murmur Ring
In this lightning talk, Ashley will discuss how to rethink immersive experiences digitally and share insight from a current experiment in remote research during the pandemic. Participants in the breakout session will have an opportunity to delve more deeply into how we can use the current context to rethink and add to core tenets of human-centered design.
Engagement in Remote Collaboration
Jim Kalbach, Head of Customer Experience at MURAL
Remote work is not new, but effective collaboration in distributed teams has never been more relevant than right now in these challenging times. This talk focuses on key techniques facilitators of remote sessions can use to keep participants engaged and improve efficiency.
Participatory Design From Afar
Ana Domb, Consultant in UX Research and Strategy, IxDA Board of Directors
How do we create inclusive and participatory design processes in a time of social isolation? What approaches will allow us to include those who are still on the other side of the digital divide? I'll share what I'm learning as I try to navigate these challenges with all the optimism I can muster.
Design Critiques From a Distance
Marie Gosal, Design Director at MetaLab
Running remote design critiques is no easy feat. How do you create the right amount of structure needed to ritualize critique, yet allow for the flexibility needed across timezones, team sizes, and seemingly impossible calendar Tetris? This talk will cover techniques and experiments to try with your team whether your newly remote, semi-remote, or fully distributed.
HMW keep remote workshops engaging?
Hany Rizk, Founder and Design Sprint Facilitator at No BS Innovation Studio
One of the most common concerns about remote workshops is keeping participants engaged. While facilitators of in-person workshops could read the room and sense the participants' concerns or motivations, they now have to discover new dynamics for remote workshops. In this session, we will work on better understanding what affects participant engagement, and think of ideas for new approaches, methods, and techniques that could be applied to keep remote workshops engaging.
About our speakers
Ashley Lukasik
Ashley Lukasik’s passion is creating the conditions for collective creativity. Founder of Murmur Ring, she curates powerful experiences to help organizations accomplish their strategic aims through immersive encounters, collective discourse, and storytelling. After completing her M.A. in Anthropology at the University of Chicago and running a startup company that licensed UofC medical technology, Ashley spent eight years overseeing partnerships and communications at the visionary design school,
IIT Institute of Design. There, she helped organizations use human-centered design to respond to complex challenges for which they did not have a preexisting roadmap, and launched
The New Bauhaus feature documentary, which she co-produced.
Jim Kalbach
Jim Kalbach is a noted author, speaker, and instructor in design, customer experience, and strategy. He is currently Head of Customer Experience at
MURAL, the leading online whiteboard. Jim has worked with large companies, such as eBay, Audi, Sony, Elsevier Science, Lexis Nexis, and Citrix.
In 2007 Jim published his first full-length book, Designing Web Navigation (O’Reilly, 2007). His second book, Mapping Experiences (O’Reilly, 2016), focuses on the role of visualizations in strategy and innovation. He blogs at experiencinginformation.com and tweets under @jimkalbach.
Ana Domb
Ana Domb Krauskopf is an independent design researcher and strategist. She founded and directed the Interaction Design School at Veritas University in Costa Rica, the first IxD graduate program in Central America. She currently teaches at Lead University. Ana is a director for IxDA’s global Board of Directors and for the Costa Rican Museum of Contemporary Art and Design. Previously she was the Director of Brand Innovation at Almabrands in Chile. In the US, she worked at THE MEME, a design consultancy based out of Cambridge, MA.
Ana holds a Master's degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT, where she was part of the Convergence Culture Consortium under the direction of Henry Jenkins.
In past lives, she’s worked as a journalist, filmmaker and music producer. She has consulted with Turner Broadcasting, Comcast, BAC-Credomatic, Mesoamérica, HIVOS, UICN, amongst others. Ana tweets under @anadk.
Marie Gosal
Marie Gosal is a Design Director at
MetaLab. She has over ten years of experience leading creative teams, both at agencies and in-house. At MetaLab, her role has her guiding teams to solve complex product design problems across an array of industries. You can count on her for asking thoughtful questions, seeking unforgettable design solutions, and sharing obscure trivia knowledge. Marie tweets under
@mariegosal.
Hany Rizk
Hany Rizk is a UX & Product Strategist based in Berlin, running
No BS, an innovation studio that helps companies solve real challenges, create meaningful solutions, and deliver mindful experiences. For over 10 years he has designed and led in-house products and services for large corporations such as Volkswagen, and various startups — including his own Somuchmore that was later acquired. Hany mentors startups and gives talks on UX, Product, and Innovation. He tweets under
@hanyrizk_.