Talks and Workshops
Design for Adoption
Talk or Workshop
Great products fail when teams map needs while ignoring incentives: the user's own and those of retailers, wholesalers, regulators, and purchasers. Human-centered design is built for the first and blind to the second. This session introduces the X, Why, and MEE™ Framework for mapping multi-stakeholder ecosystems and designing for systemic adoption.
Building High-Performing Design and Innovation Cultures
Workshop
Every executive can name a company whose design is a differentiator. Yet few were taught what it takes to build one, because business schools rarely cover the realities of running a productive design or innovation organization. A proclamation is not enough. These cultures are systematically seeded, cultivated, and sustained, not delegated, by the C-suite. The underestimated changes start at the top: how this work gets funded, how these people get evaluated, and crucially, how projects get green lit or culled. This session provides an operational blueprint for structuring and scaling creative teams that improve the bottom line.
Trust as a Design Medium
Talk
In an era when privacy is monetized, institutions are under attack, and established science is questioned, products must earn user confidence at every step. When long-term value relies on users revealing deeply personal data, trust can no longer be a byproduct of good service. Product leaders must approach trust as a foundational design medium—deploying it just as deliberately as color, form, layout, and typography.
Writing
Jul 2013
Good Critique Skills are crucial for healthy creative, and also business environments. This framework was delivered as a course at the 2012 ACM SIGGRAPH Conference, and an abridged version at the 2011 ACM SIGGRAPH Business Symposium and
Jul 2019
A vision wall is the most cost-effective tool a creative leader has to keep his team fully aligned and up to date on the project’s scope, design, end-to-end journeys, and look/feel. It’s a physical, analog wall where the entire experience is laid out, with interaction pathways delineated from the visual treatment, and iterations literally pasted on top of the old ones to provide a complete revision history. Teams can talk side by side while reviewing, walking through, debating, and addressing design challenges.
