Cyd Harrell
Cyd will tell stories of partnering with public servants to shape government experiences that honor people's capabilities and human dignity. She will also review the best ways to foster trust with institutional partners who face difficult design decisions, as well as what it takes to support design practices in challenging environments.
Cyd is well known in industry and government for her creative approach to UX research and service design. She is currently consulting as the Service Design Lead at the Judicial Council of California. In her previous roles with Code for America, the Center for Civic Design, and 18F, she has helped cities, counties, and federal government agencies use the power of design to create better citizen experiences.
Cyd strives to merge a geek’s enthusiasm for the digital with a humane sense of modern civic responsibility, and she believes that design is an important practice for bringing our shared institutions into the 21st century (she also believes that design can do much better at including all perspectives). When not at the office helping public servants use design for good, she is a mentor for mid-senior UX practitioners and serves on the board of the Institute for Applied Tinkering and as an advisor for Ethnio.
Previously, Cyd was the VP of Research for SF-based UX design firm Bolt|Peters until June 2012, when Facebook acquired the company. While there, she helped clients such as Sony, Volkswagen, and Rdio to conduct remote research and real-time usability studies. In the early 2000s, she led desktop experience and design standards groups at Charles Schwab.
Dr. Tarek Loubani
Medical devices are used on people sliding toward health disaster and have tremendous potential to help — and also to harm. Small design decisions made during the engineering, packaging, and distribution of these devices can unexpectedly tip the scales from one side to the other.
Emergency physician Dr. Tarek Loubani will discuss these challenges through his work with the Glia Project. Glia uses a free/open-access process to create high-quality and low-cost medical hardware. From design to deployment, he’ll deconstruct the failures of tourniquets and other life-saving devices as they’re used in one of the harshest environments imaginable: the Gaza Strip.
Tarek Loubani is an emergency physician at London Health Sciences Centre (Canada) and Shifa Hospital (Gaza). He is also an associate professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Western Ontario, where in 2018 he won the annual teaching excellence award from the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance.
Tarek is well known in Canada and abroad for his humanitarian work through the Glia Project. The Glia team designs high-quality, low-cost, open source medical hardware that can be manufactured onsite at locations that lack access to resources. Examples include a 3D-printed $3 stethoscope whose performance matches that of the industry’s gold standard, and a tourniquet that functions even better than premium brands that cost over 7 times more. The project is currently creating a pulse oximeter, electrocardiogram, and hemodialysis machine.
Eva-Lotta Lamm
We are visual creatures by nature. We start to look at the world around us and making sense of what we see before we start to speak. We consume hundreds of images everyday: photographs, infographics, diagrams, maps, icons, emoticons. We are pretty much experts when it comes to understanding information presented in a visual way. But when it comes to expressing ourselves visually, we are often not as well versed. We might pick some emoticons to add a personal touch to messages or share a photo, but we still too rarely (or never) use the full potential of visual expression to make our important ideas and thoughts heard and understood. We talk at length but we don’t get up often enough to sketch out our ideas on a whiteboard in front of our colleagues. We write a lot, but we don’t use the power of visual structure and spatial arrangement enough to give our words an extra layer of meaning and make them quicker and easier to scan.
In her talk, Eva-Lotta will show why Visual Literacy and Visual Fluency matter and how images, visual structure and spatial arrangement can complement words in a powerful way. She will talk about her experience using pen and paper (or marker and whiteboard) to explain complex problems and share the insights she gained in the process.
Eva-Lotta Lamm is a designer, illustrator and visual thinker. She grew up in Germany, worked in Paris and London for a few years before packing up her backpack and go travelling the world for 14 months. She has over 12 years of experience working on digital products as an in-house designer for Google, Skype, and Yahoo! as well as freelancing and consulting for various agencies and her own clients. After being a (semi-)nomad for 2 years, she is now based in Berlin, helping her clients to make complex problems visual so they can ‘see’ them from a fresh perspective and work on solving them more efficiently.
After originally studying graphic design and later crossing over into the digital realm, Eva-Lotta became a sought after expert and teacher in the area of sketching, sketchnoting and visual thinking. She is regularly speaking at international design conferences and has been teaching sketching workshops at conferences and for companies for many years. She is known for taking sketchnotes at hundreds of talks and conferences and has self-published her notes in several books. During her world trip, she documented her experience as daily sketchnotes in her travel diary.
In her personal sketching practice, she is exploring the area of Visual Improvisation, where she is looking at the parallels between sketching and improvisation and experiments with how the principles from her regular theatre improvisation practice can be used to inspire visual work.
Eva-Lotta is also the illustrator of two amazing UX books, Content Everywhere by Sara Wachter-Boettcher and The User’s Journey by Donna Lichaw, both published by our friends at Rosenfeld Media.
Bryce Johnson
In your experiences, what barriers do you (inadvertently) create and who do they exclude? We’ll take you through the Microsoft Inclusive Design principles and how they were used to create the Xbox Adaptive controller and then give you some tips on how you can remove unnecessary friction from your experiences.
Before designing the Xbox Adaptive Controller the team needed to recognize the barriers that traditional controllers create for people with limited mobility. What unnecessary barriers do you (inadvertently) create, and who do they exclude? Bryce will take you through the Microsoft Inclusive Design principles and how they were used to create the Xbox Adaptive controller and then give you some tips on how you can remove unnecessary friction from your experiences.
Originally from Toronto, Bryce has been designing accessible experiences and technology for over 15 years. As a member of Team Xbox he was part of the core team that started the inclusive design and accessibility practice. Bryce worked across Microsoft teams to launch the assistive technologies on the Xbox One, including Copilot. Bryce initiated and designed the very first Inclusive Tech Lab at Microsoft, which has now hosted over six thousand visitors; it is a facility where people can explore how people with disabilities interact with Microsoft games, services, and devices.
Bryce is also one of the inventors of the Xbox Adaptive Controller ever since he was a lead on its project at the 2016 Microsoft One Week Hackathon. Bryce is currently the Inclusive Lead for Microsoft Devices, where he works to ensure all Microsoft hardware are designed and built to be inclusive.
Bryce is a long term friend of our event, as he was a panelist at the very first edition in 2005, and has attended all of the first five editions of CanUX in Banff, AB.
Farai Madzima
Can cultural background make it difficult to be effective at human centered design? I got fired from a job because my African culture made me suck at my job. Seriously.
In Zimbabwean Shona culture, we expect and live with unequal distribution of power in society. Less powerful members of social groups expect to not have a voice or option in many situations. I had no idea that this was a thing, or that it would matter in my work. Until my first design job at an agency in London. I failed to collaborate and co-design with team members who I thought of as senior. I even found myself unable to conduct user interviews with people I thought of as senior. These failures messed up the project and in the end, I got fired.
This talk is for designers from non-western cultures and the teams who work with them. People from different cultures can bring viewpoints that make our product more inclusive. But, they may also bring cultural biases that impact the way we work together on the said product.
An interaction designer originally from Zimbabwe, Farai Madzima is one of the new voices taking the UX conference circuit by storm, presenting his unique take on working effectively in multicultural teams. Farai is currently working as UX Lead in the logistics experience design leadership team at the Shopify headquarters in Ottawa, building next-generation tools that make e-commerce easier for everyone. He is also the organizer of the Pixel Up! meetups and conferences, events that connect African designers and developers with their peers in the rest of the world.
Farai spent the last 14 years helping design and build products and teams in the UK, South Africa and Canada. Previously, Farai led Standard Bank South Africa’s team of designers and researchers in Johannesburg. There, he designed banking apps used by many across the continent, while grappling with some unique design challenges because most local internet users have never used a laptop or desktop, and some buy data by the megabyte.
An interesting tidbit about Farai is the he was originally studying to be a doctor, but he didn’t get the grades. In our opinion, that’s medicine’s loss. And who knows, maybe one day he’ll become a Doctor of Design. He also has an appreciation for words (irrespective of the language), is a fan of township jazz and nerdy hip-hop, and likes the number 127.
Amy Ross
Join NASA Space Suit Engineer Amy Ross as she separates fact from fiction through some fascinating insights on what it takes to conduct qualitative research for designing space suits event when there is no scientific method that can be tailored perfectly for this context.
Amy Ross leads the advanced space suit pressure garment development team at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Every day is an adventure as technologies and concepts for space suits to take humans beyond Earth are realized.
The scope of the work ranges from understanding human physiology to awareness of geologic exploration activities on planetary surfaces to knowledge of the fabrics that can keep humans safe and help them to be productive in hazardous environments. Currently her team is designing a suit of the future for demonstration on the International Space Station.
In her own words, designing spacesuits is a challenge. “You’re always widening your path toward the ideal. Ideally you’d build a spacesuit that weighs almost nothing, is very comfortable, allows you to move as if you don’t have a spacesuit on. There is probably an unattainable ideal out there, but you’re always working toward that.”
Amy is the third ever speaker from NASA to grace the CanUX stage, following appearances by AMES Research Center UX Manager Steve Hillenius in 2015, and fellow Johnson Space Center spacesuit designer Lindsay Aitchison in 2017.
Kim Goodwin
The most critical aspects of a user experience are often left defined outside of the design team, starting with decisions about the revenue model and the definition of success.
And when somebody makes the wrong decision... nobody wants to be featured in yet another news story about technology behaving badly.
And yet, most design teams invest a lot more in UI design systems than they do in enabling better UX decisions across the organization.
Kim will share several models that may help your team rethink their approach.
If you were lucky to be in our audience five years ago, you witnessed one of the most memorable and emotional closing keynotes in CanUX history. We’re thrilled to have Kim Goodwin return to the CanUX stage in 2019 to celebrate our 10th anniversary.
She is the bestselling author of Designing for the Digital Age. Kim has spent over 20 years in UX, both consulting and in-house, helping organizations build their internal design capabilities through coaching and organizational change management.
Previously, Kim was VP of Design & General Manager at Cooper, a leading design and strategy agency in San Francisco. During her 12 years there, Kim led an integrated practice of interaction, visual, and industrial designers, as well as the development of the acclaimed Cooper design curriculum. As VP of Product and User Experience at PatientsLikeMe, Kim guided designers and PMs in combining a patient support network with a medical research platform.
Kim has led design and research projects in healthcare, aviation, retail, communication, financial services, consumer, enterprise, automotive, IT, and other industries. She speaks and teaches regularly at UX conferences around the world. Although Kim is based near San Francisco, she is often in another time zone, most often keynoting a major conference.
As stellar as she is on stage, Kim is also an accomplished wildlife photographer. One of her Instagram accounts (kim.goodwin) showcases some of her most breathtaking nature and wildlife photos, mostly taken in places with no internet access.
- https://twitter.com/evalottchen/status/1191004091272585218
- https://twitter.com/brenna_613/status/1190738082175311872
Steve Portigal
The old maxim says we should “Find a need and fill it;” while at a one level that is certainly true, even in this era of fetishized disruption, organizations seem to easily fall in love with the idea of being in the problem solving business. Steve will review a number of different mindsets for creating products and services, consider their benefits and risks, and challenge you to go beyond a fixing mentality.
Steve Portigal helps companies to think and act strategically when innovating with user insights. He is the founder and Principal of Portigal Consulting, a boutique insights and strategy firm headquartered on the foggy coast south of the San Francisco Bay Area. Steve also speaks about culture, innovation, and design at companies and conferences across the globe, the author of two books: the classic Interviewing Users: How To Uncover Compelling Insights and Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories.
In the past 20+ years Steve has interviewed families eating breakfast, rock musicians, credit-default swap traders, and radiologists. His work has informed the development of music gear, wine packaging, medical information systems, corporate intranets, videoconferencing systems, and iPod accessories. He is a fellow Canadian (he has a graduate degree in HCI from the University of Guelph) making his 3rd appearance at CanUX events, and is an avid photographer who has a Museum of Foreign Groceries in his home.
Steve was also featured in Business Week, the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle. Way back, Steve also built one of the first online communities (Undercover, a Rolling Stones fan group) in 1992, nurturing it from a time when the Internet was an underground academic technology through to today, as part of a global info-infrastructure.
Lining Yao
Morphing matter has unique behavior: it is fluidic and morphing, and it travels across the boundary of the physical and the digital. For people designing with its physical medium, morphing matter adds a flavor of programmability and responsiveness; for those designing with its digital medium, it adds tangibility and sensational experiences.
Morphing matter is transforming and mutating. It is an evoking design material as it adds spatial and temporal dimensionality. It reacts, adapts, and evolves; soon it will also grow, replicate, and age.
Morphing Matter is ecological. It recapitulates natural organisms, sourcing and reacting to environmental energy stimuli. It demonstrates the reciprocal relationship between the engineered and the grown. In this talk, Lining presents recent work conducted by Morphing Matter Lab from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, weaved through with threads about the behaviours and techniques of morphing matter.
Born in Mongolia, where she says her “only media input was from nature”, Lining Yao was inspired by the living world and how even the smallest and seemingly inconsequential lifeforms would adapt to external stimuli. Using microresolution printing, she modifies cells that can be woven into ‘biofabrics’, self-folding thermoplastic composites, bio-hybrid wearable devices or even edible 2D films that become 3D while cooking (yes, flat ship pasta actually exists). In an interview in Wired, she explained how she uses of this approach everywhere, with organic materials serving as a “technology that brings us back to nature, brings us back to the original form of life — a single cell [but] a cell that can incorporate input, computation, and output; the cell as a computer.”
She is an Assistant Professor at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) at Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science, directing the Morphing Matter Lab. The lab develops materials, tools, and applications of adaptive, dynamic and intelligent morphing matter from nano to macro scales. Research often combines material science, computational fabrication and creative design practices. Lining and her lab work anti-disciplinarily, publishing and exhibiting across science, engineering, design and art.
She gained her PhD at MIT Media Lab, where she combined biological and engineering approaches to develop physical materials with dynamic and tunable properties including shape, color, stiffness, texture and density.
Before coming to the US, she had been deeply involved in her local design and manufacturing industry, both as a design consultant and entrepreneur. She has won numerous industrial design awards including Red Dot Award and iF Design Award. She also has a BS, MFA, Art and Design from Zhejiang University, China.
- https://twitter.com/cydharrell/status/1191018685810520067
- https://twitter.com/brenna_613/status/1191023822192943106
Alastair Somerville
Using ideas from past cognitive accessibility projects, and AR and VR design, this talk is about using human-centered design to develop tools that flex around the shifting worlds of experience design. Using personal perception and perspectives, we can map and understand how we shift between realities, between products, now, and into the future.
Alastair Somerville is a sensory design consultant based in Stroud, UK, which he describes as “like Portland, Oregon but weirder”. He provides expert advice on cognition and person-centered design to companies and public organizations who provide both physical and digital products or services. He facilitates workshops on sensory and emotional design for corporations and major conferences, including South By Southwest (SxSW), UX Week, Interaction, etc. He is currently involved in cognitive accessibility and VR projects in visitor attractions and museums.
Working closely with clients and users, he has developed a number of new technologies and techniques for making information more inclusive to people with both physical and cognitive impairments. Currently he is working on new concepts of UX design for Cognitive Accessibility in both physical and digital places.
Previously, he has worked with 3D printing and novel tactile printing systems on major accessibility projects for international museums, including the Natural History Museum and the Imperial War Museum in London. He also works with universities on research into the cognition of senses and specializes in tactile design and haptic comprehension, and provides usability laboratories for companies developing new products and services and has particular experience in working with older people and people with physical and/or cognitive impairments.
- Slides
- Slides (PDF)
- https://twitter.com/evalottchen/status/1191374323451346944
- https://twitter.com/Acuity_Design/status/1191336348256538625
Emma Howell
Talk to FRANK is a government service that provides unbiased information about street drugs to young adults. The 10 year old site came to us bloated with FAQs, stories from visitors and news articles. They were trying to keep up to date with new substances and information entering the drugs scene but were creating a sense of disorientation and confusion on the site. Awareness and use of FRANK was declining as the once loyal audience were getting older and a very modest marketing budget made advertising challenging. FRANK was jostling with information from the likes of Youtube, Vice and Pill Reports.
Our job was to make sure young adults could make more informed decisions about drugs by getting accurate, unbiased information quickly and easily. We wanted to make FRANK the go to resource for information about drugs. And we did. Once we’d finished with FRANK, traffic had increased by 39%, there was a 21% improvement in people finding the information they needed, accessibility improved by 171% and there was an 80% reduction in hosting costs.
How did we do this? At the very core of the project was Inclusive Design. We created a programme that supported the work of our cross functional team to ensure that we were able to embed inclusive design at the core of our work. We will share how we created a measurable design research approach to test our new branding and designs. We will show you how to use it in your projects.
We set up a research framework using a mix of methodologies that allowed constant user feedback, including extensive accessibility testing. We will show you how design, dev and tech implemented the UX findings to create an inclusive service We will share how we measured the impacts of our decisions and design. This talk will be a candid reflection on our journey with the Talk to Frank service redesign and the power of inclusive design.
Emma Howell is the Research Director at cxpartners, a renowned UK-based user experience design consultancy. Based out of the Bristol office, she has 13 years of research experience, starting in academia before finding her way to crafting lovely digital stuff. She has a mixed bag of research experience. Her fave bits include: studying insect camouflage in British woodlands, observing a troupe of baboons for 2 months, depth interviews with vulnerable Bristol citizens to improve council services, and helping the Samaritans to improve their services for people in emotional distress.
She is particularly passionate about pushing awareness of inclusive design in all of her research projects and empowering the next generation of female designers. She is also the co-author of Researching UX: User Research.
- https://twitter.com/evalottchen/status/1191375063431491584
- https://twitter.com/cydharrell/status/1191062833192165377
- https://twitter.com/cydharrell/status/1191062290377924609
- https://twitter.com/EricTse_/status/1191069415611260928
- https://twitter.com/Mar_Warrender/status/1191339668014600192
Bill Buxton
In this talk, renowned Canadian designer Bill Buxton will reflect on the important of "situated intelligence."
In the wild, places are transitory and so we ask: how can we connect these experiences of going from out home to our mode of transportation, to work, and other places?
Currently, the problem is that these experiences are siloed by separate products and services that do not adequatly serve a human's contiuous interaction.
For over 40 years, as designer, musician, lecturer, writer, teacher, critic and researcher, Bill has been obsessed with the evolving human-technology dance. From the creative disciplines of music, his focus has evolved to the broader stage upon which this dance takes place. A practicing skeptimist, he is a devotee of Melvin Kranzbergís first law: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral. It will be some combination of the two.” Thus, he is driven by a pursuit of “informed design,” without which he believes the bias will most likely lean towards the bad rather than the good.
In December 2005, he was appointed Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. Prior to that, he was Principal of his own Toronto-based boutique design and consulting firm, Buxton Design.
Bill earned his Bachelor of Music degree at Queen’s University in Kingston, ON. Around that time, he was also introduced to the world of computing while working on a “digital music machine” project at the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) in our very own Ottawa, where he ended up commuting on a beloved custom BMW R69S motorcycle named “Mabel”. He captured that particular snapshot of his life in an essay titled My Vision Isn’t My Vision included in the book HCI Remixed: Reflections on Works That Have Influenced the HCI Community, a collection of short stories charting the emergence of the HCI field.
He then studied and taught for two years at the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht, Holland. Designing his own digital musical instruments led him to the University of Toronto, where he completed an MSc in Computer Science, and subsequently jointed the faculty. It is also the path that brought him into the field of human-computer interaction, which is his technical area of specialty.
Between 1987 and 1989, Bill lived in Cambridge England, helping establish a new satellite of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (EuroPARC). From 1989-94 he split his time between Toronto, where he was Scientific Director of the Ontario Telepresence Project, and Palo Alto, California, where he was a consulting researcher at Xerox PARC. From 1994 until December 2002, he was Chief Scientist of Alias|Wavefront, the company behind the renowned 3D modelling and animation package Maya, (now part of Autodesk) and from 1995, its parent company SGI Inc.
In the fall of 2004, he became a part-time instructor in the Department of Industrial Design at the Ontario College of Art and Design. In 2004/05 he was also Visiting Professor at the Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI) at the University of Toronto.
Outside of work, Bill loves the outdoors. He is especially passionate about mountains, including skiing, climbing, and touring. This interest extends to the written word. He has contributed to the literature on mountain history and exploration, is an avid climbing and mountaineering bibliophile, and was on the jury of the 2005 Banff Mountain Book Festival. He is an accomplished equestrian, an avid cyclist, and active in kayaking, canoeing, and windsurfing.