2012WesternDDCtopics

We are adding new session and wrokshop information daily. Check back often for updates to the lineup.

Session Title:
A Change in Trade: Why the Linear and Prescriptive Innovation Process is No Longer Relevant in a Digital World
DAVID THORPE

The design world is in a state of flux; the big agency and linear budget-busting approaches to solving problems are breaking down. New brands are born daily and old strategies no longer work to support them. This presents an exciting opportunity for the field of design to rethink its trade and either continue to innovate or break. Thorpe will discuss this shift in the design industry.

Session Title:
Culture, Courage & Clients: Design Collaboration Reimagined
ANA MARIA PINTO da SILVA

Collaboration between teams of interdisciplinary designers and complex clients is central to our work as designers. A great collaboration has immense transformative power for the client, the vendor and, above all, the end user. This talk will explore the ways in which strong project cultures ensure both courageous collaboration and design excellence.

Session Title:
Designing for the "Irrational" Brain
NIKKI PFARR

As humans, we don't always make rational decisions: We volunteer to work for free, we don't max out our retirement savings or we opt for pizza instead of salad. It turns out human decision making can be influenced by a variety of seemingly irrelevant factors, which ultimately lead us to do things that may not be in our best interests. The behavioral economics field, grounded in cognitive psychology, helps us understand how and why irrational behavior occurs. This is of tremendous value to designers, particularly as design evolves from focusing on aesthetics and usability to facilitating positive behavior change. This session will provide an introduction to behavioral economics as a tool that can help designers better understand human behavior, craft solutions that will be more effective at eliciting certain behaviors and more accurately predict how users will respond when faced with new choices.

Session Title:
Digital Entertainment—Mashup, Remix or Reboot?
CARL LEDBETTER

The way people interact with and enjoy media, games and digital content is evolving at a staggering rate. Natural user input, Web enabled devices and the confluence of social digital media is changing the way we play at home and in life. This presentation will surface the effects of new and emerging types of entertainment content and how it is transforming the way we live and the way we design.

Session Title:
From Cities to Door Pulls: A Design Process for all Scales
KEVIN KUDO-KING

As designers, we seek to create architecture that does more than provide shelter and serve its function. We want to create buildings that inspire their inhabitants to see and interact with their surroundings. Our architecture is about the physical: site, context, the materials they are built with, the spaces between these materials and how they connect. It is also about the experiential: the occupant’s movement from space to space, how they touch the building and how they can interact with moving parts to change their environment. We take these core principles and apply them to all project scales—from cities to high-rises, museums to houses, cabins to door pulls. There are two aspects of our design process that we will focus on during this session. For the first, it is the importance to engage with a broad range of disciplines, such as engineers, builders, artists, fabricators, artisans, filmmakers, mathematicians and even puppeteers. The second is the importance to blur the boundaries between design and construction. Our process involves fabricators and builders during the conceptual phases, and we maintain latitude within our ideas for discoveries during construction. This presentation will explore these topics through a presentation of built and conceptual work.

Session Title:
GATORADE: The Designed Evolution of a Brand
STANLEY HAINSWORTH

As a globally recognized brand, Gatorade had long been successful in its fundamental mission of bringing hydration to athletes during competition and training. But in a changing marketplace filled with more discerning and demanding consumers, they lacked a full range of sports nutrition products to supplement the many diverse training stages and workout routines of the modern athlete. The multi-disciplined designers at Tether helped introduce, develop and bring a fresh, holistic approach to the new world of nutrition—and created the strategy, product structures, graphics and life of the brand that highlighted both the science and the soul of the brand. This framework has empowered the brand to extend their new strategy across all consumer touch points in a comprehensively integrated fashion: leveraging product, identity, advertising, retail theater and event presence in ways that have reinvigorated the spirit of the brand. Hainsworth will show the Tether process and result that was a true cross-discipline effort of the strategists, graphic designers, industrial designers, writers, videographers and account management.

Session Title:
Making Things in a Digital World
TOM HOBBS

Many designers are drawn to the profession because of an innate desire to create things. Real things. They’re the kind of people that as children loved to create pictures, build models, construct Legos or explore programming computers. It’s the pursuit of tangibly affecting the world around us by actually adding new things to it. Ironically, the practice of fully fledged designers is a little more abstract, particularly for interaction designers. It is less about exploring an analog of the actual thing. Instead it is about creating descriptions, diagrams and specifications of what we believe the end result should be. As we move to a design world that is dominated by creation of digital experiences and devices that house them, what does it mean to make our design practices about making things?

Session Title:
Prototyping to Launch a Lean Startup and a Revolution
CARRIE FERRENCE

Stockbox launched a prototype store in fall 2011 to test a brand new approach to grocery store design. This two-month journey, inside a Mobile Mini construction trailer, re-shaped the company's understanding of their customer, the problem they were solving and the approach needed to launch the business and a good food revolution. Join Ferrence as she deconstructs their approach to continuous prototyping and highlights how lessons learned will be integrated into their new store design and evolving business plan.

Session Title:
The Attention Deficit Designer
JON WINEBRENNER

Designers around the world have to fight through a cacophony of distractions. From Facebook, to squirrels and everything in between, we all struggle with how to balance the flashing lights around us with the desire to do something great with our life. But what if you have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder? If you have a creative mind, there's a good chance you are living somewhere within the spectrum defined by ADHD. Winebrenner was diagnosed as having ADHD around his 40th birthday. Although he’s suspected he has it, he’s been fighting it since…well…forever. The Attention Deficit Designer is a talk that hopes to enlighten everyone to the idea that ADHD is not a curse, but merely a part of the human condition.

Session Title:
What's all the fuss about? Brand strategists have been doing it for years!
PAUL WYLDE

System design, sustainability, political context, blurring of boundary, localization, cross of discipline and DIY design still appear to be the overriding themes of the moment if you read the blogs, but these issues have been around for over 20 years. So what's all the fuss about?
Good design, like every other profession, has always been and will always be about driving positive change within the context of a community. Designing “in-context” has always been central to Wylde’s thinking, which is what inspired the title of the presentation. Learning that the true decision makers within organizations have often decided the success criteria long before a designer is invited to participate, Wylde will explore how industrial design in his view is dead. And, how we are all now part of, whether we like it or not, the ultimate system of brand expression.

Session Title:
When the Road Less Traveled Starts Getting Crowded
MARK SELANDER

In our professional lives carving a niche seems mandatory for survival. How can we find the best path to do what we love and still make a living alongside everyone else striving for the same thing? Seasoned design professionals and those just starting their careers, deal with the contradictory needs of developing focused expertise while effectively maneuvering across an increasing array of disciplines. Selander will present and explore some of the projects that he has worked on, highlighting methods for creating a unique and varied working life that evolves over time to meet the demands and opportunities of a growing profession.
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Submitted by alexr on January 31, 2012 - 2:53pm