Annertech at “Defuse: Design for Use 2017” Conference

Defuse (Design for use), the Ignite event organised by IxDA Dublin took place at The Sugar Club, a venue in Dublin that, until now, I had only ever attended for concerts.

Everything started very gig-like. The queuing outside until doors were opened (it happened to be the coldest day of the year so far), the darkness of the venue, everything.

The conference style was also very concert-like: 12 speakers, 20 slides each and 15 seconds per slide. That’s even faster than the PechaKucha with a generous 6 minutes and 40 seconds in total (20 slides, 20 seconds each).

It reminded me of a Ramones gig where songs are played twice the speed of the records and linked together with a mere “one, two, three, for”. Very punk indeed with clear messages and straight to the point. The audience certainly enjoyed the night.

First to take the stage was Trevor Vaugh and his “Design as an agent of Liminality” “song” was mainly about how we designers can save the world, quoting Romantic poet John Keats’ “Negative capability”. Designers have to leave your comfort zone and venture “where the magic happens”.

Billy Fitzgerald was up next. His “Threading the Needle” talk gave us eleven very useful tips to be an effective designer in the real world, with the last one being the most cherished of them all - No one understands what a UX designer actually does!

He was followed by service designer Susan Butler and her “There's no App for that” session where she explained non-digital design, offline interactions. She explained the three necessary stages to creating change (Relationship, Doing with, and doing without).

Jennifer Sheahan, who was exposed to science at home in her early years followed, showing us that testing with children is really hard with her “Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Parents?” talk.

Architect and designer Ronan Kenny and his “Who are the Architects of our Future?” explored the similarities between both fields. Considering architects as visionaries who have the power to execute, concluded that, of course, UXers are the new architects!

The first part finished with “Caution: Robots at work”, a talk by Ruth Kelly where she stressed out in giving the power to the user in this world we live in of automated cars or websites that build themselves. How might this impact our roles as designers? Can designers just accept that this is going to happen? Of course not, designers have the power to be the voice of the user.

All attendees had been given a blank card for the sketching competition as we entered the venue. This year it was “How might we enable better interaction between the north and the south side of Dublin?”. At the interval the cards were collected.

Second half started with Sheena Bouchier, who explored “The difference about designing for startups?” or a design agency. Designing for other agencies can be hard for a designer when compared to a design agency where we all see the world from the same angle.

Surprisingly enough, start-ups find change difficult as well as a traditional agency. Human brains just don’t like change! Believe it or not, startups find change difficult too, and if we add “fear” to the equation, they like it even less. Understanding the context of opposition to change is the key.

Sherif Mekky took the stage next to talk about “Experiment, because assumptions are the mother of all failed products”. Ideas and solutions are still assumptions, and there is a risk of building a solution that nobody needs, so… experiment!

Forget about the solution for the moment and find out the problem: Users are the experts that were not in the room.

Alessandro Argenio followed with “Honest Connected Objects: what is the immediate future of IoT, and where do we go from there?”. He said that as a designer he has been always interested in objects and psychologie, such as imagining a world where objects had honesty, where his sofa knew all about him…

Louise Cooper’s talk was about “Tackling a social problem with conversation”. Sharing stories and ideas is very important and nowadays we are conversing less and less (there is always something to blame: whatsapp, social media, etc). She gave 3 examples of different communities and how to get people back talking to each other. Keep having conversations! We have more in common than we think!

Next on the stage was Piers Scott to talk about a few things he has learned about growing design thinking with his “Lessons in Designing Design Departments” talk.

With speakers having 12 slides to use, 11 was a common number in the night. He delighted us with 11 rules, grouped on three different categories: (People, Communicating Value and Principles).

All of them were so useful and good to keep in mind at all times, the likes of “you can’t do it alone” when starting a project and get involvement from the organisation, “Be scrappy” or take the initiative, not showing but telling or the importance of learning to say no or planning for growth. He concluded by saying that “you are building trust”.

Finally, Jeff Simons closed the event talking about distributed teams on his “Remote together: lessons learned designing products as a distributed team”. With Annertech being a fully distributed company, the advantages were already very clear to us. Jeff mentioned the tools he uses during his talk, which was based on the remote approach to “Forming / Storming / Norming / Performing”.

Overall it was fun. The type of night where there is no point in taking notes, better off just listening and absorbing as much as you can. Very fast and high quality talks indeed.

The sketching competition winner was announced, and we were all reminded on Interaction 18, the “DrupalCon” of UX Design that this year takes place in Lyon. Still some tickets available, have you got yours?