Luis Arnal

Director, in/situm

Field Stories from Latin America: Considerations for Design Researchers

The research process is full of traps and uncertainty. No matter how many times you have done research, it always feels like the first time.

Marty Gage

Design Research Vice President, Lextant

Insight translation: bridging the gap between research and design

If design is problem solving, then design research is problem seeking. Expressing these design problems or opportunities in a meaningful and
inspirational manner can be the difference between great design thinking and wasted time and money.

Maria Giudice

CEO and Founder, Hot Studio, Inc

Can’t We Just All Get Along? Human-centered Design Meets Agile Development

How can designers and developers work together in a process that seems to be contradictory in nature — and how does visual design fit into the picture? How can we best create integration, collaboration and implementation around seemingly divergent methodologies and languages?

Mark Greiner

Senior Vice President, WorkSpace Futures, Steelcase Inc.

Business by Design

Starting a new business isn’t easy,… it’s even more difficult when there is not an existing entity to start with and improve on. You obviously need an idea, some seed money, and people to get the work done.

Larry Leifer

Professor, Engineering Design (ME Department)
Director, Stanford Center for Design Research,
Director, Stanford Industry Affiliate Program
in Design
Member, Hasso Plattner Institute of Design
at Stanford

Dancing with Ambiguity: Is it the Designers' Fault or the Users'?

The best possible products and services will result from design methods and protocols that pay equal attention to user and designer factors. Where many programs put the user and market under the microscope, we put the designers themselves.

Colleen Murray

Design Strategist, Jump Associates

Researchers are often forced to make early strategic decisions. When working on explorative, future-looking projects, this can be incredible challenging. How can we best frame our research to solve future problems, when we don’t know what the future looks like?

Don Norman

Breed Prof. of Design, Design & Operations,
Northwestern University
Co-Director MMM, the MBA + MEM program
Co-Director, Segal Design Institute
Cofounder, Nielsen Norman group
www.jnd.org

How do we know what to do in novel situations? Sometimes we ask, sometimes we watch. And at other times we make inferences, sometimes by what I call social signifiers.

Girish Prabhu, Ph.D

Manager – Design Research & Innovation, Intel Corporation

All global corporations now have the mission “to generate innovations that span both mature and emerging economies”. Socio-cultural, business environment dynamics and governmental differences necessitate much deeper understanding of these different economies.

Laura Seargeant Richardson

Director of Design Strategy & Research, M3 Design

"In deconstruction... there is no meaning to be found in the actual text, but only in the various...'virtual texts' constructed by [researchers] in their search for meaning"

Liz Sanders

President, MakeTools

There has been significant interest lately from the business community in the value of design research and design thinking.

Rob Tannen

Director of Research, Bresslergroup 

High-Definition User Research

Like the proverbial shoe-less cobbler’s children, user researchers have historically lacked appropriate technology for studying…how people use technology. But this has changed with the emergence of a variety of tools that can be applied to data gathering, analysis and sharing. Now there is a need for awareness and guidance in the selection and use of such research technologies.

Miguel Gomez Winebrenner

Senior Consultant, Cheskin Added Value

Maximizing Design and Innovation by Keeping a Pulse on Multicultural Audiences

The high growth of the multicultural population in the U.S. is a mandate for all product developers and designers. Innovations need to appeal to multicultural consumers in order to ensure marketplace success.

Indi Young

Consultant and co-founder of Adaptive Path

Mental  Models: Sparking Creativity Through Empathy

Mental models are diagrams  that represent the underlying philosophies and emotions that drive people's  behavior, matched up with the ways you support them with your product. Rather  than knowing "I like to go to movies alone," you'll dig down to the myriad  reasons why.

More speakers TBA