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Your 11AM Choices on June 1st…Oh My!!!

When you go to the Big Design Conference 2012, the 11AM hour is your another “power hour” of speakers.  Yes, you have to choose to between maintaining your design sanity, beyond gamification, thriving in SASS, and design thinking in World War II.  Your speakers include an independent UX consultant, a design rock star, a development geek, and a UX soldier.  Yes, we have a former soldier talking about design thinking in World War II.  How cool is that!  Details are below.

Choice #1: Maintaining Your Design Sanity

In-house designers, or ”creatives”, regularly work for companies and organizations that are not in the design field. In-house design is a two-sided coin. In many cases these designers work alone without other creative staff for support. Regularly they are relied upon to develop and maintain brand identity, websites, and other web and print promotional material. This can be difficult when bosses “don’t get design”, or have a limited understanding of what it means to have a consistent message. However these jobs can have less stress and better benefits than agency or freelance positions.

This talk will explore Doug CohenMiller’s personal experience working as an in-house designer in multiple organizations and will provide practical methods for keeping work interesting, and resources available to allow in-house designers to continue being passionate about design.

Choice #2: Beyond Gamification–Designing Behavior Change Games

Playing games is the prototypical example for an intrinsically motivating activity and motivation in healthcare is a pivotal issue. Each year, billions of dollars are spent to move our behaviors in a healthier direction to avert crisis such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and other costly and painful afflictions. Leveraging the motivational dynamics of gameplay to energize and sustain people through behavior change is a challenging yet profound solution.

In this talk, we’ll double-tap into the techniques game designers use to motivate, engage and reward players through a game’s lifecycle combining a playful approach with structured behavior change conventions.

Choice #3: Surviving CSS By Thriving With SASS

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a core technology of the Internet. All web sites rely on this presentation language for displaying its pages. CSS is incredibly tricky. It’s seemingly built well for no single audience confounding artists and frustrating programmers alike. Without planning a project’s CSS can turn into a proverbial mess of spaghetti code because it has no formal structure as traditional programming languages.

Lovely additions to CSS3 such as drop-shadows and gradient-backgrounds turn ugly given a myriad of browser-specific tags. There are ways to survive and thrive developing CSS. In this talk we introduce SASS, a freely available open-source tool that sits on top of CSS. SASS adds key features to CSS such as reuse, logical structure, inheritance, and functions.

SASS is detailed during this presentation showing how it can help solve significant shortcomings of CSS easily and completely. Best practices earned from real-world use cases are summarized for the audience in illustrative slides and copious demos.

Choice #4: Axis & Allies–Design Thinking in World War II

The Axis and Allies had vastly different approaches to design during the second World War. The German war machine operated with equipment built around such values as precision, technical accuracy, and complex innovation. By contrast, Allied equipment was often simpler, more durable, and “scrappier.”

The trade-offs are fascinating: Durability vs. accuracy. Reliability vs. uniqueness. Speed of delivery vs. quality control. Usability vs. power. There is much a modern-day designer (in any field) can learn from armies of the past and the industries and cultures behind them.

So many choices, you will want to register today!


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