New Techniques for Design for AI

AI innovations have spread across most aspects of people’s lives. Spam filters block messages no one wants, ride-sharing services predict service demand and dynamically adjust pricing, entertainment and retail services recommend desired items and content, bots and robots automate tedious and dangerous work, and intelligent systems help forecast the future, from this week’s weather to the number of sweaters a company will sell to how bad traffic might be. Recent advances created new capabilities, such as systems that detect cancer better than doctors, AI players that beat grandmasters, driverless road and aerial vehicles, and content generation systems that open a world of possibility and raise red flags around ethics and unintended harm.

The success of AI makes it feel like this technology is ripe for innovation. However, today, almost 90% of AI initiatives fail. In addition, innovation teams often fail to recognize low-hanging fruit, situations where a little simple AI would add real customer value. Current technical innovation approaches don’t work well when applied to AI. The HCI research community has been working on how to improve the process from brainstorming to prototyping to delivery. This workshop takes some of what we’ve been teaching our students at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and adopts it for practitioners.

Sketching & Visual Thinking

We are visual creatures by nature. We start to look at the world around us and making sense of what we see before we start to speak. We consume hundreds of images everyday: photographs, infographics, diagrams, maps, icons, emoticons. We are pretty much experts when it comes to understanding information presented in a visual way.

But when it comes to expressing ourselves visually, we are often not as well versed. We might pick some emoticons to add a personal touch to messages or share a photo, but we still too rarely (or never) use the full potential of visual expression to make our important ideas and thoughts heard and understood.

We talk at length but we don't get up often enough to sketch out our ideas on a whiteboard in front of our colleagues. We write a lot, but we don't use the power of visual structure and spatial arrangement enough to give our words an extra layer of meaning and make them quicker and easier to scan.

In her talk, Eva-Lotta will show why sketching and Visual Thinking are super powers we should implement into our daily work. She will talk about her experience using pen and paper (or marker and whiteboard) to explore and explain complex problems and share the insights she gained in the process.

Secrets of the most creative people and companies

Creativity is at the heart of innovation. It shapes how products, stories, and designs come to life, but it's elusive. How can we bring more of it into our work and lives?

Aarron Walter, the co-host of the acclaimed Design Better Podcast, takes you into the process of some of the most pioneering and inventive figures in creative disciplines. From the groundbreaking methodologies at Pixar and Apple to the ingenious minds of cultural icons like John Cleese (Monty Python), David Sedaris (Humorist), OK GO (the world's most creative band) and the legendary design duo Charles and Ray Eames, this talk goes deep into the alchemy of creativity.

Aarron's insights span across disciplines, including product design, music, writing, animation, acting, and fashion design, providing a broad perspective on how creativity can be harnessed both individually and in teams.

Shape your future self

Jason Mesut will share an overview of the visual frameworks he has been developing over the past 17 years. These frameworks help design teams, leaders and designers to reflect on their career and self, define their unique profile, and focus their future path. Helping you understand yourself better. So that you can sharpen your future focus.

Through his role as a team leader, and with workshops he runs with the community and his clients, he has seen how valuable it is for designers to self-reflect on who they are, and focus the areas in which they feel like they should develop. Whether that’s within, or beyond the context of the organisation in which they work.

He believes using these visual frameworks can help:

• Hire the right people and build the right teams for your organisation
• Reflect on your own abilities as designers, leaders and managers
• Direct your own and your team’s development
• Teams feel better about who they are within their organisation and recognise the opportunities of staying rather than leaving to grow themselves

High-Impact Product Teams

Low-impact product teams are all around us, and all too familiar to many of us. These teams prioritize work that sounds defensible, not work that contributes to the company’s high-level goals. They debate processes and responsibilities within and across their own teams, rather than working together to do the work that matters most. They drive intermediate success metrics like engagement and feature adoption, but struggle to understand how these metrics add up to growth and revenue targets.

It doesn’t need to be this way. At organizations large and small, product teams are recognizing that they cannot succeed as teams and individuals if they do not contribute to the success of their business overall. In this talk, product leader, consultant, and author of Product Management in Practice Matt LeMay describes how product teams can embrace their shared responsibility, align themselves around high-level business objectives, and deliver meaningful results for the business at large.

Question,Closing

After party