Part 1 – Aiming for Innovation: Living Design in a Business World

In this session we will talk about design thinking and how it relates to software product development in general, and to HCI design in particular. We will also explore the values and methods of strategic ideation and see how they can be applied in various real life/real work situations.

Working in a product development environment we often find ourselves grappling with tricky, squirrelly problems. Requirements are often vaguely defined and frequently change as new information emerges about the market, our competitors, etc. How do we design for the right solution when objectives are unclear and requirements are shifting? Moreover, how do we get all the stakeholders to agree on the same outcomes?

A traditional business approach might dictate the use of logic and a clearly defined process such as a SWOT analysis to build parity, while a design thinking approach might consider the end user’s goals and seek out an innovative solution that aptly fulfills their needs. This presentation will show that the two solutions become more effective when combined, and offer an optimal solution that adheres to both user and business requirements.

Brynn Evans, User Research Consultant
Brynn Evans is a Ph.D. student, digital anthropologist, and design research consultant. She has studied how people think, act, and behave in social contexts for 10 years, both as a psychologist and an ethnographer. Her dissertation work is on the role of social interactions during search (so-called “social search”), and how to design online systems that support collaborative question-answering. As a consultant, she's been involved with the betacup initiative, whose goal is to redesign the reusable coffee mug to better align with people's coffee drinking practices. She has also worked on projects as diverse as designing a "social shirt" to understanding the how web developers' motivations and priorities influence their choice of software development tools.

Brynn holds a master's degree in Cognitive Science and undergraduate degrees in Science & Technology in Society, and Psychology. She was awarded the 2nd place prize for her research on social search at the Computer-Human Interaction conference in 2009. She recently moved back to San Francisco from San Diego, and enjoys drinking Japanese green tea in the mornings while listening to San Francisco's less well-known (Mission) flock of parrots fly overhead.

Krista Sanders, Creative Director, Stone Cobra
Krista has more than 10 years of experience as a designer for both online and offline products. She is experienced with creating designs that adhere to both industry standards for quality as well as client usability. Recently, she gained recognition for her user interface work on one of the Top 40 most innovative applications.

Prior to Stone Cobra, Krista had the distinction of designing and producing Nationally Recognized Multimedia Programs in support of compliance to government regulations. She also worked as a Design Specialist to identify and design effective applications to address client-side gaps in professional development practices; one such project resulted in a five-fold increase in productivity saving 2,880 man hours per year.

Part 2 – Taming Complexity and Sparking Innovation Through Ideation and Design Thinking

A design thinking approach to product development gives us a place to start and a way to proceed with problems that are tricky and ill-defined. It can help tame their complexity and uncover innovative solutions. At the heart of this approach is ideation, the capacity for generating ideas and entertaining alternatives, which we most often practice in brainstorming sessions. In this talk we will look at the background, values and techniques of brainstorming and how to structure effective brainstorm sessions. We will also look at the ways group brainstorms can enhance team performance and serve as the sparkplug for an innovation pipeline.

Gayle Curtis, Design Consultant
Gayle Curtis is a design consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area, specializing in user interface architecture and design strategy for online ventures and interactive products. Recently he was Principal Interaction Designer at Yahoo!, and earlier he was Creative Director for Information Architecture at Vivid Studios/ModemMedia. He has led the interaction design and user experience architecture for several startup ventures, and at Stanford he taught courses in Product and HCI design. He is most recently part of the teaching team at the d.school. At Yahoo! he developed a practice area in strategic ideation and disseminated it through workshops in the US and Asia.