Sociolinguistics, Design Research, and You: How to Languate Gooder

Join me to explore the intersection of sociolinguistics - that is, how and why we talk the way we do - and design research. Learn how applying core concepts from sociolinguistics can improve the way you conduct your work. Have you ever thought about...

How the way you sound, and the words you use, might influence a research participant’s responses during testing?
How our experiences and cultural backgrounds, and those of our research participants, influence the collection and analysis of research data because of the way we speak?
Getting ‘meta’ for a moment - how we as a design research community communicate what we do - and how we may inadvertently exclude others through the language we use, turning people away from our cause?

Design Research 2021 Day 1 - Caylie Panuccio

People, Purposes, Patterns & Problem Space

How can your org go deep? How can it find 1000 more opportunities to support by studying the patterns that come from people's inner thinking as they pursue their purposes? Indi will unfold a way to bring this powerful perspective to your organization.

Design Research 2021 Day 1 - Indi Young

Finding the Sweet Spot: Leveraging Insights to Shape Strategic Direction

I work in the Australian superannuation industry – an industry which is complex, typically conservative, highly regulated and characterised by customer apathy and disengagement. 

We’ve been striving to drive customer-centric change at UniSuper for 3-4 years now, leveraging research to reverse engineer processes and shift mindsets. In 2019, I co-presented our journey mapping journey at Design Research alongside my colleague, Leah Mackenzie. 

This is “Chapter 2” of my story. It’s about what happened when the groundswell we had created resulted in a breakthrough moment: Customer Experience (CX) having a seat at the decision-making table. 

This presentation will cover my experiences leading a small CX team to influence UniSuper’s strategic direction through organisation-wide collaboration. It’s about what we did with our seat, and how we did it, to ensure that the voice of the customer was heard authentically all the way up to Board level. I’ll cover using insights to drive action through codesign of enterprise initiatives, and lessons learned when addressing both business and customer needs over the course of 9 months.

This talk is for anyone who is grappling with the challenge of translating customer insights into strategic action. How can we advance the business impact of research?

Design Research 2021 Day 1 - Kate Hardgrave

Trauma-Informed Design Research

Trauma is common within society at large and is particularly prevalent amongst vulnerable populations, First Nations peoples and people with Lived Experience of mental health issues. Trauma informed practice is a strengths-based framework that supports responsiveness to the impact of trauma, enabling physical, psychological, and emotional safety for both providers and survivors. In this presentation Jax will discuss the five guiding principles of trauma informed practice; safety, choice, collaboration, trustworthiness and empowerment and consider how they may apply within design research contexts.

Design Research 2021 Day 2 - Jax Wechsler

Design Research 2021 Day 2 - Laura Ryan

How To Design Your Own “Empathy Walk” (and make your stakeholders live your research findings)

What can you make your audience experience in 30 minutes? Try being a single mum in subsidized housing in Chicago and see what kind of decisions you have to make to avoid homelessness. Or be a maize farmer in rural Zambia, anxious for the annual harvest, and see if he will buy your client’s health insurance product. 

In this series of stories I'll show you a method that I believe should be in every research team's field kit when it comes time to story-telling and bringing your findings back into the boardroom. Come see how you can craft your own empathy walk from your research findings, and help your audience really connect with the people whose stories you are trying to tell, and the problems you are trying to make visible.

Design Research 2021 Day 3 - Kim Chatterjee

A Stakeholders Point of View on Engaging in Research

Researchers often struggle to engage stakeholders in research. As someone who has been a stakeholder myself, I also want to be engaged in the research so I can use it as an input to make design decisions. If both parties have this common goal, why is stakeholder engagement such a challenge? In this presentation I'll share a stakeholders point of view of how to make research outputs impactful.

Design Research 2021 Day 3 - Lucy Denton

UX Australia 2021 Day 2
Design Systems with augmented teams: best practice for connection and alignment

UXA2021 Josh Thompson

UX Australia Day 3 
Presenting Your Designs Using Spontaneous Talks Framework

UXA 2021 Jen Blatz

UX Australia Day 3 
…And then a HIPPO walked into a room…

UXA 2021 Mags Hanley

UX Australia Day 4 
Artificial Intelligence and Content Strategy

UXA 2021 Elle Gerghty

Design Research 2022
Neuro-Science and Design Research

DR2022 Jax Wechsler

As designer leaders, we want to be able to make wise decisions and we want to draw on wisdom to guide us as we lead our teams and design in organisations.

Fortunately we don’t have to wait until we are old and grey to access wisdom; it can be experienced through ways of thinking and acting. In this talk we will explore what wisdom is made up of (according to research )and how we as design leaders can use aspects of wisdom now.

DL2022 Sarah Stokes - Wise design leadership is closer ...

When were the concepts behind the double diamond invented?

When was the first 'how might we' question asked?

When did people start 'brainstorming'?

The answers are all in a 30 year period after the end of World War 2, when parallel intellectual movements centred around creating scientific methodologies for creativity and design thrived in America and the UK. Many of the ideas, principles, and design processes of that age are still with us today.

In this talk, we will do more than describe yet another design process model - we will explore the historical and cultural origins of the design and creativity methods that are still common in design, and interrogate how those origins could be embedding biased assumptions in the work we do today.

DL2022 Zoe Rose - ‘Scientific design methods’ and ‘applied creativity’: a lost history

Anthropology’s, and by extension Ethnography’s remit is frequently defined as asking the question, 'what does it mean to be human'? But, what if humans were not at the centre of what we do? Solving global issues and promoting systemic change, means changing not just the inputs but also our point of view.

DR2023 Sophie Goodman & Bec Purser - Bin Chickens & Beavers

Scattered research write-ups, a heap of new employees, and everyone is WFH. When even the researchers are saying “hey, where’s that report about xyz we wrote last week?”, it’s time to get organised with a research repository - though we have no budget and no new tools. I’ll be sharing the story and pitfalls of how we built a repository on a shoestring, to raise awareness and improve access to research in the business, with minimal admin overhead (the real holy grail).

DR2023 Naomi Civins - More than a filing cabinet: building a flexible, useful research repository

While we often focus on users and the products that deliver value to them, nothing would exist if it wasn't for the organizations that make these products.

If we look at organizations under a product lens, we have a system that grows and evolves in time, fulfilling its ultimate goal: delivering a product or service for its users.

But how does this system grow? This is often left to individuals to figure it out, a lot of frameworks focus on the "ideal state" and not on the change to get us there. By understanding that organizations are living systems and not static structures we can break the illusion of the "ideal team" and "ideal company" and focus instead on the pragmatic goal: managing meaningful change that creates more efficient organizations that benefit employees and, ultimately, users.

Because let's be clear: no organization ever fits any ideal model.

In this talk we are going to see how we can use our skills to approach meaningful and direct change in organizations, through processes, culture, and ultimately, the wellbeing of all the people that make things happen.

UXA2023 Erin Casali - Driving organizational change with co-design

Interested in how government + design + sustainability experts came together to co-design a "world-first" tool to tackle global warming? If so come along to this talk for an up-close look at how we managed to achieve the impossible —> getting agreement on a way forward when all of the experts told us this was NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN.

UXA2023 Nova Franklin, James Elks & Katie Eyles - Collaboration!! Reducing embodied carbon together.

Regenerative design. What’s that mean and why should I care? How do I design for regeneration in my own life and design practice? Let's explore practical ways we can design regenerative business, product, and service ideas that customers love - and increase our wellbeing while we do it.

UXA2023 Ben Pecotich - Regenerative Design & Innovation… for Happier Communities.

The lack of a moral framework in the design disciple, let alone a set of ethical guidelines, put designers at great risk of doing more harm than good in the world.

UXA2023 George Aye - That Quiet Little Voice: When Design and Ethics Collide

When were diamonds first used to describe the design process?

When was the first 'how might we' question asked?

What were the original steps of 'brainstorming'?

Some answers to these questions can be found in a 30 year period in America after the end of World War 2, when parallel intellectual movements centred around creating scientific methodologies for creativity and design thrived. Many of the ideas, principles, and design processes of that age are still with us today.

Other answers are much, much older.

In this talk, we will do more than describe yet another design process model. Instead, we will explore the historical and cultural origins of the design and creativity methods that are still common in design, and we will explore how they were both informed by and developed in reaction to the emergence of computing and large-scale data management. By the end of the talk, you will have a new perspective on how the origins of our methodologies can embed biased assumptions in the work we do today.

UXA2023 Zoë Rose - Creative thinking methodologies: a lost history

Going smaller, to go bigger: A design system evolution. 

Over the past 2 years the Atlassian Design System team have been reimagining how a design system needs to evolve to be a force multiplier for good - good for our own team, good for our designers and developers and good for our customers. They’ll share their journey towards unlocking a thriving design system which supports the past, the present and the future all at the same time and how they evolved it to drive both purpose and impact at scale. In a time of economic uncertainty, different design models of what good looks like not only become necessary but essential to fuel the next decade of design system’s growth. We’ll share the highs and lows and wisdom we have gained by going smaller, to go bigger.

UXA2023 Eva Plaisted, Klaus Paiva & Maria Christley - Going smaller, to go bigger...

As a UXR I spend a lot of time note-taking and would love to share a note-taking strategy that saves my team and I a HEAP of time (and money). The new strategy is visual (which clients love) quick to synthesise (which researchers love) and easily translates findings into design recommendations (which designers love). You can thank me later.

UXA2023 Amelia Purvis - Your new cheat sheet for note taking and synthesis

With the worldwide population of adults over the age of 65 growing faster than any other according to the United Nations, considering their voice in designing the 3D embodiment of the internet (the Metaverse) is necessary for moving away from the deficit model of ageing, especially coming out of the pandemic. This presentation advocates for an ethnographic, co-design approach with older adults for those looking to design in a fully immersive space.

UXA2023 Yasamin Asadi - Designing for a post-lockdown metaverse

What we learnt about service design living in France

UXA2023 Karina Smith & Alexandra Almond - What We Learnt About Service Design Living In France

Information Architecture (IA) is foundational for great usability and user experience. But for IA to become embedded in the product development process, we must use the language of product: what user problems does IA solve and what are the commercial/ organisational benefits? 
 
In this talk I will share ideas and approaches on:
- A better way to explain IA to product people/stakeholders
- How to frame IA work in terms of stories, strategy and metrics

UXA2023 Penny Goodwin - Information Architecture and product development

On most objective measures, the design industry is thriving. Our skills are in high demand, our salaries are rising, and companies can’t fill roles fast enough (recent blip notwithstanding). Design leadership has come of age, we’re seeing companies invest in team development, and more and more designers are earning that hallowed “seat at the table”. So why, when I talk to designers, do so many of them feel burnt out and despondent; like all their hard work and effort has been for nothing. It’s as though the design industry is going through some sort of mid-life crisis.

In this session design leader, start-up advisor, speaker and coach, Andy Budd, takes us through some of the reasons why we’re experiencing this sense of collective Ennui, and what we can do about it. This talk may make for awkward listening at times. However, unless we can have an open and honest conversation about the behaviors that are holding us back, we’ll never unlock the full potential of what design has to offer.

UXA2023 Andy Budd - Design's Mid Life Crisis

UX Australia 2016

Humanizing user experience

Who do you trust?

UX Australia 2017

No one wants to SUX: A focus on inclusive user experience techniques

Bad design is bad for your health: Why data visualization details matter

Shaping signals: Preparing for the future through speculative design

Zoe Rose - Disability As A Driver Of Innovation

Karina Hickey -  Putting together your UX research portfolio: how to make post-it notes sexy

Putting people at the heart of a service transformation which drives scale and lasting value.

Design can be a powerful tool for traditionally conservative spaces like Mergers and Acquisitions. This is a story about how we took a strategic design approach to bring together three very different companies and align them on a shared, people centred value proposition and practice to own an emergent health category. It's also a story about the power of design, thinking and doing, and its ability to transform organisations and drive authentic experiences and valuable outcomes for customers, staff and investors.

UXAUS 2020 DAY 4 Simon Tobias & Ash Donaldson - Putting people at the heart

User experience, service design, customer experience and related conferences. 

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