In winter quarter, the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering hosts a 10-week seminar series on User Experience (UX), where we welcome industry experts to speak about current issues and research in the field.
JANUARY 18
Control and Simplicity in the Age of AI
An age-old tension in design: maximize simplicity or offer customizable control. Using Google Clips as a case study, this talk will explore the balance of control and simplicity in the age of designing for AI.
About the speaker Gabe Clapper is a Senior UX Designer at Google. He works on a team that explores the intersection of AI and UX in the near future of tech product development.
JANUARY 25
Prototyping, Building, and Testing Physical + Digital Experiences
Can designers build upon today's widely used platforms like web and mobile while extending beyond these into a frontier of UX design for Physical and Digital products?
About the speaker Ryan Moore is a User Experience Designer building consumer and commercial product ecosystems. As an inventor, UX designer, and industrial designer for the past 10+ years, his focus extends beyond web and mobile. Today Ryan is working on UX design for medical grade products.
FEBRUARY 1
Bringing Gaming into Classrooms at Scale
This session will explore the complexity of implementing game-based learning pedagogies in classroom environments. Delivering research on current tools and techniques being used in classrooms in North America, the session will discuss the best practices to help engage students, support teachers and explore strategies with software to help with this transition.
About the speaker Andy Cargile is a seasoned UX leader in both hardware and software products with a relentless passion for the user experience. For over 30 years, he has practiced user-centered design in startups, consultancies, large corporations, and higher education. He creates products that solve meaningful needs and that make a difference. Most recently, Andy has been leading an innovation effort in game-based learning at SMART. He holds a BS and MS from Stanford and an MDes from the Institute of Design at IIT.
FEBRUARY 8 (CANCELED)
Working Backwards to Design for the Future
This lecture is canceled due to weather.
How do you design for a future that is quickly growing all around you? In a world powered by emerging technologies like connected devices, machine learning, and natural language processing, we need to design customer experiences with little or no precedent. Having a hand in this innovation, Amazon has a mission to focus on its customers and create product experiences that are truly useful and delightful in this new world. But how do we invent for a future that doesn’t exist yet? How do we make sure we’re on the right track? In this talk, Janet Galore will share how Amazon sets a vision for the future, and how it builds a path to get us there.
About the speaker Janet directs Amazon’s Concept Lab in the Retail Experience Design group at Amazon and has with the company for just over five years. In her previous ten years at Microsoft, she directed and prototyped future customer experiences for Microsoft Research. Her earlier career was spent designing, directing, and animating at a variety of entertainment startups, after doing graduate studies in pure mathematics. Outside of work, Janet is a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker, and is on the 4Culture Public Art Advisory Committee, as well as the Board of Directors at Arts Corps.
FEBRUARY 15
Sure everyone can do research...but can everyone be a researcher? Exploring the future of the user experience research discipline
Is there a role for the User Experience Researcher in the rapidly changing world of technology and product design? With the rise of data science and agile methodology, the prevalence of robust design patterns and libraries, and the easy access to research tools that can empower anyone to be a user advocate, why should the role of UX Research continue to exist? This talk will review some examples that illustrate the multiple challenges that face the UX Research discipline, and propose a series of approaches that counter the challenges to ensure its continued success.
About the speaker Stephen Giff is a native of London but has lived in Seattle since 2001 (with a brief spell…3 years... in Copenhagen). He received a Bachelors Degree in Psychology from Birkbeck College, University of London, and a Masters in HF/HCI from UCL. Since that time, Stephen has worked on a variety of technology - from the web, eLearning, ERP, developer tools, to advertising and hardware. He is passionate about the UX Research discipline and thinking about how it needs to evolve to meet the ever-changing challenges of the tech industry. He loves seeing the world through the eyes of customers, and partnering with design/business/engineering to turn the insights uncovered into meaningful solutions. Stephen is currently a UX Research Manager at Google where he is focused on the Google Cloud Platform.
FEBRUARY 22
Trust, Transparency + Tarot Cards: Envisioning Outcomes to Build Better Products
Instead of “move fast and break things,” it’s time to slow down and ask the right questions of our tech products.
After years creating products that engage the user and keep them coming back for more, the tech + design community is realizing that the consequences of delight at scale aren’t so enchanting after all. Fake news, smartphone addiction and dirty tricks with data have demonstrated that delightful products don’t have inherently good outcomes.
But the impact of technology doesn’t have to come as a surprise. We can build more trustworthy and transparent products by surfacing their outcomes during the design process—both the ones you want to happen, and the ones you want to avoid.
About the speaker Sheryl Cababa is an Executive Creative Director at Artefact and has 20 years of experience in product design and consultancy. With one foot planted in design research and strategy, and another in interaction design, Sheryl has the unique ability to see both the forest as well as the trees. She has also helped other designers spark their creativity by leading workshops in sketching, interaction design, and design research methods. She has delivered presentations and workshops at conferences including Better World by Design, Seattle Interactive Conference, and IxDA.
MARCH 1
Beyond Screens: Design Careers of the Future
Over the past few decades, the definition of a designer has rapidly evolved alongside technology. From print, to web, to mobile, the roles of professional designers have shifted, as have the tools, skills, and challenges they face every day. As interfaces continue to expand beyond handheld devices, what will the role of designers be in 5 or 10 years from now? This presentation will explore design specializations that are already emerging and will become increasingly relevant in the future including voice, biometric design, and machine learning design. It will highlight the challenges these designers face, the tools and skills that are needed, and what you can do now to get up to speed with these developing fields.
About the speaker
Chelsea is a product design manager at Facebook and an interdisciplinary technology-focused artist. In addition to building great products, she is passionate about building design culture in data-driven environments and driving processes to innovate at scale.
Klukas is also the co-founder of MakeFashion, a wearable technology startup that brings high tech and high fashion to the runway. MakeFashion has created over 100 wearable tech garments and has produced runway shows across the world including New York, Shenzhen, and Rome. Her “Lumen Couture” projector hat, a hat that includes real-time projection mapping and visual inputs to display video on a dress, has gained international attention as the first of its kind.
Prior to Facebook, Klukas was a UX design manager at Amazon focused on social consumer products including Amazon Spark and Echo Look. Before Amazon she was the creative director of BeauCoo, a social shopping startup that helped women find clothes that fit, and design lead at Poynt, a cross-platform location-based app with 20M users that pioneered augmented reality features in the early days of iOS.
MARCH 8
Future/Forward: Landscapes of Opportunity at the Edge of the Virtual World
Talk video is for registered students only and can be found in the course canvas site
As computation spills out of our tablets and cell phones into devices of every kind, our lives have increasingly become a platform themselves, our very heartbeats inflecting the powerful intersection of the digital and physical world. Looking across the next decade, how will the technologies we design shape our human experience? In this talk Amazon Principal UX Designer, Ana Pinto da Silva explores the complex, generative landscape of opportunity emerging at intersection of virtual and physical space, offering a consideration of what it means to be truly human in a technological world as we pass the quarter mark of the 21st Century.
About the speaker
Ana Pinto da Silva is a designer, technologist and community builder dedicating to creating products and services that define new landscapes of opportunity for people world-wide.
MARCH 15 (CANCELED)
Communicating Design
This lecture is canceled due to illness.
As with any great design, it’s only as good as how it’s perceived or understood by those intended to benefit from its value. As designers, how we communicate our work, and decision-making rationale is fundamental to the impact we make within any organization large or small. Understanding both the art and science of evidence based story-telling can often mean the difference between selling a winning idea or going back to the drawing board and starting anew. Clarity of communication has never been a more important skill for designers contending with the rapid and growing complexities of the 21st century. This talk offers simple and useful tools for presenting your design solutions in clear, data-driven way.
About the speaker
Reem Gamil is the Head of UX & Design for Amazon Global Payment Products where she leads UX strategy, research, and brand design across platforms. Before joining Amazon in 2016, Reem served as director of experience design for Vertafore; a Seattle-based SaaS company supporting the insurance industry. While there, Reem oversaw the customer experience for the company’s 25+ product portfolio. In 2012, she served as senior consultant at CGI, Toronto supporting industry verticals in both B2B and B2C domains from banking, health care, e-commerce, and telecommunications.