June 29 2016 Masterclass
A free, half-day masterclass of panels, lectures, and workshops exploring how startups can create a culture that enables great design to thrive.
Who Should attend?
Founders
Learn how to infuse good design into your organization’s DNA, whether your designer is employee #2 or #200.
Designers
Discover new methods to improve the way you collaborate with founders, development teams, and customers.
Advisors
Explore proven approaches to fostering empathy and achieving a shared vision of success among founders, designers, and stakeholders.
Program
12:00-1:30
Panel
How to Get the Most—and the Best—Out of Designers
Hiring the right designers is important, but it’s only the first step. For designers to work effectively, it’s essential to create an environment in which design is valued and designers can thrive. Our panelists will discuss approaches and techniques that have helped them build a culture of good design.
Panelists
Moderator
1:30-3:30
Workshop
Design Thinking to Design Doing
Facilitated by Chris Avore
This interactive workshop will begin with understanding the structure of a business problem and the core building blocks of how to treat it more like a design problem. We’ll use personas based on research to ground our understanding of our customer. Then we’ll use the design studio method to explore multiple possible solutions to the customer’s problem and apply the language of critique to discuss how to effectively iterate until we’ve arrived at a useful, viable, desirable solution.
Participants will learn and experiment with:
- Crafting evidence-based personas through research
- Sketching via the design studio methodology
- Critique to address strengths and weakness of design solutions
3:30-5:00
Lecture & Conversation
Becoming Pro/Design: How to Leverage Design’s Increasing Role in Business
This lecture will kick off with a brief landscape of the changing expectations of design over the last few years. We’ll investigate topics that may ring familiar such as agile, Lean UX, and Design Thinking, and identify how companies of all sizes apply such themes to be successful. We’ll explore how the next steps of design-led companies may lie in everyone being a designer as needs scale across organizations.
We’ll continue with an interview with Peter Merholz, a veteran Bay Area product executive who coined the term Blog (no, seriously, it’s in the OED). Peter was a founding partner at user experience consultancy Adaptive Path and has led product and design teams at Groupon, Jawbone, OpenTable, and many others.
Lastly, we’ll take questions from the audience to further extend the exploration into becoming Pro/Design.
Special Guest
