MidwestUX 2018

Jumpstart your day with three short talks followed by live demos and lively discussion. We'll explore building smarter chatbots, designing with VR prototyping tools, and demystifying the practice of design pairing.

Schedule

• 10:15am - 10:30am: The Mission Driven Designer
• 10:35am - 10:50am: Prototyping Designs in VR
• 10:55am - 11:10am: Dynamic Duos: A Pair of Designers Explains Design Pairing
• 11:15am - 12:00pm: Interactive demos

The Mission Driven Designer
Jayneil Dalal

In this hands-on talk, Jayneil will share his journey of building chatbots for the IA Summit and Big Design conferences to reduce the workload on the conference organizers. Attendees will learn about the best practices for conversational design from interviews he conducted with AI startups such as Lemonade, x.ai etc. In the grand finale, Jayneil will do a live demo of the official MidwestUX slackbot to show how machine learning and design blend together to create delightful bots.

Get a deeper understanding of the challenges as well as best practices for designing chatbots via live demos of good and bad bots in the marketplace. Understand the importance of IA in chatbots by creating mind maps to track different conversation pathways a bot can have with its users. Learn how to use Botkit Studio and Microsoft Luis.ai to build smart bots.

Prototyping Designs in VR
AnnaRose Girvin, Gavin Morrissey

Can virtual reality be leveraged for the design process? Virtual Reality is a powerful, immersive medium that can transport us to different contexts; as VR headsets become more accessible, so do the prototyping tools. It's becoming easier to quickly render these immersive spaces for daily use. This talk will explore some of the emerging VR/Mixed reality prototyping tools and explore some future use cases for VR in research, co-creation, ideation and presentation phases of design work.

Dynamic Duos: A Pair of Designers Explains Design Pairing
Matt Dobson, Lelia Rechtin

In this duo talk, Matt and Lelia will give an introduction to design pairing (two designers sharing a computer and working together, constantly communicating and collaborating). They’ll explore the benefits of design pairing, attempt to demystify the practice, and discuss how pairing works across disciplines. This talk includes a live, mostly improvised, demonstration of how design pairing works in real-life.

Get your afternoon pick-me-up with three short talks followed by interactive demos and lively discussion. We'll learn about prototyping a mushroom lab, finding design inspiration in video games, and making a social impact through performative research.

Schedule

• 2:30pm - 2:45pm: Well, That Didn't Work...
• 2:50pm - 3:05pm: Game Brain: How to Use Video Games to Design Better Products
• 3:10pm - 3:25pm: Performative Research: Designing for Social Change
• 3:30pm - 4:15pm: Interactive demos

Well, That Didn't Work...
Justin Smith, Roman Titus

How do you take on challenging work that is definitely outside your comfort zone? Join Roman Titus and Justin Smith to discuss how they routinely get in over their heads, freak out a little, and then adapt and iterate to finish the project. You’ll walk away with the comforting anecdotal evidence that getting thrown in the deep end isn't the worst thing in the world.


Game Brain: How to Use Video Games to Design Better Products
Justin Smith

Justin Smith uses games on a daily basis to create better experiences at Cartoon Network. There’s lots of inspiration to be found in games that’s not found in traditional interfaces. There are tenets of games’ design that can, and should, be applied to non-gaming experiences. This talk will walk through how to use games as a lens for designing experiences. Even non gamers can participate in the same conversations without ever picking up a controller. You'll walk away with a clear method for using games to help design better experiences as well as how to use games to connect and align with your team.

Justin will also be leading an interactive demo of some of Cartoon Network's games. He can talk through the design process of those games and how they inform Cartoon Network's non-gaming products. He will also have the Emmy award winning Cartoon Network app available for use and be able to answer any questions attendees have about it.


Performative Research: Designing for Social Change
Malaz Elgemiabby

In 2015, Malaz embarked on a task to design a new orphanage for abandoned children born outside of wedlock in Sudan. The brief from the management outlined the program and requirements. However, after careful investigation, she discovered that a far more important problem was overlooked in that brief: half of the babies admitted die within the first week due to the condition of their abandonment. This session will explore the creative research and design process that resulted from the many challenges this project faced—such as social stigma and mapping the abandonment journey—to design a better solution to the problem.