–Engage

“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.” - Steve Jobs

Speaking Engagements

I love to teach. It’s why I moved from industry to education. There are so many opportunities to learn, explore, expand, discover through teaching that I find teaching to be one of the best ways to become a better designer. In that regard, I am also interested in newer contexts to expose my thinking to other groups of people.

If you have a conference, event, or organization that would be interested in one of my teaching topics below, please do reach out to me and let me know how my teaching services could be of use to your organization or community.

My talks and workshops include:

The Craft of Observation: Learn how to make observation a core part of your life and practice, so that you can shorten research lifecycle times, and be prepared to make better design decisions in your every day work.

Mobile Is Changing Interaction Design: Are You Ready to Make Your Users Dance? We aren’t just engaging in more complex information structures and being inundated with data from every angle, our very movements are shifting, becoming more complicated, harder to remember, and difficult to even remained balanced. Interaction Designers are ever more responsible for helping people maintain their balance due to the paradigm shifts occurring in mobile interaction design. And they aren’t staying with mobile either. We are even being asked to dance in our seats.

This talk and workshop will help designers make better design decisions around gestural interface designs regardless of platform by augmenting the role of the designer with the skills necessary to become a digital interface choreographer. So let’s get your users dancing on their phones, tablets and laptops today.

Sketching is the Secret Sauce of Design: Teach your teams the value of and how to incorporate the intentionality of sketching into their every day design process. Gain creative stamina, communicate with teams sooner, and get more valuable feedback by using rougher disposable and a large quantity of ideas than ever before.

The Studio: Live it in a day: We know that design brings value, but many are still not reaching out to what really makes design special and different. It isn’t aesthetics (though they help). Rather it is the studio. This special combination of environment and mind set is the silver bullet in designer’s pocket. This workshop will help teams bring back to their organizations what it takes to set up a studio and practice the core areas of studio life so they can communicate what value it will bring to their organization.

Interaction Design: Master Class: I have taught around the world this workshop that teaches design groups, consultants and developers how to use the knowledge, processes, and frameworks that make up Interaction Design in order to create better solutions for business and end-users a like. From research through to final production of software and products.

 

If you didn’t see a topic that peaks your interest, or you have another idea of your own, don’t be afraid to contact me to see if I could craft a special workshop to fit the needs of your organization and/or community.

Be Sociable, Share!

Why It’s Not Damning to Define the Thing

This was originally published by ACM Interactions magazine in their May-June, 2013 Edition as part of their Confessions column. I re-print it here with their permission as columns like these are not made available to the public as a whole. Thank you ACM for allowing me to do this. Why It's ...

Coordination vs. Collaboration

Recently I've been made aware of different ways of thinking about "collaboration". It kinda took me for surprise be specially given the geo-social contexts, but there is no ignoring it. What I learned as two completely different activities some use the same word for or more correctly use the term ...

Report from Up to All Of Us

I'm currently on a plane heading back home after a short weekend with a group of mostly instructional designers who are at a new type of unconference (something I've never experienced before). It felt more like a retreat than a conference due to the setting and the style of interaction ...
December 12th 2012
Tags: education, general thoughts

One Comment

As Corona says, “Change your Latitude [Longitude]” – Travel is awesome.

Today I sparked a bit of a conversation after I tweeted: Everyone who is creative should move every 5-10 years; to minimally find a way to live somewhere else for a yr (sabbatical). http://twitter.com/daveixd/status/278919010391826432 Why do I put such importance on travel? What value does it give a creative person? And to the ...

Today Johnny Holland says Goodbye and I am sad & grateful

Today Johnny Holland, the amazing Interaction Design online magazine says goodbye. This news makes me feel both sad and grateful. Johnny Holland (JH) has been a rare place that allowed me to include my voice where other magazines rejected the types of topics I was interested in discussing: esoteric, foundational, semantic, ...

Search

The archives run deep. Feel free to search older content using topic keywords.