411 - Dan Brown Presentation at Prototypes, Process & Play 2017

This podcast features Dan Brown, Co-founder of Eightshapes and author of several key design books, and his Presentation, “Curiosity, Skepticism, Humility: Achieving the Right Mindset for Design Discovery in Teams” from the design leadership conference Prototypes, Process & Play on August 11th, 2017.

Prototypes, Process & Play presentation podcasts are sponsored by Balsamiq - with Balsamiq Mockups, anyone can design great software.

Dan Brown - Presentation

Co-founder of Eightshapes

In 2006, Dan Brown co-founded EightShapes, a design firm based in Washington, DC. EightShapes designs digital products and systematizes design standards for Fortune 500 clients. Most recently, Dan has conducted user research for a higher education product, designed an application for architects seeking a license, and lead the design of a web-based consumer application for a major educational publishing company.

Dan’s two books, Communicating Design and Designing Together, deal with communications and collaboration on design teams, and are widely considered to be essential reading for UX designers. UX teams all over the world have played his game Surviving Design Projects, to improve their conflict management skills. His new book Practical Design Discovery deals with the very first phase of a project, in which the product team seeks to understand the design problem.

For more, keep up with Dan at eightshapes.com or on Twitter as @brownorama.

Curiosity, Skepticism, Humility: Achieving the Right Mindset for Design Discovery in Teams

Discovery, the first part of the design process, is crucial for aligning teams and leading them to design success. A well-aligned team works toward the same goal, and brings out the best in each other because they all understand what their trying to achieve.

Discovery can take many forms: a multi-month endeavor to prepare for a complex business application, or a four-day “sprint” to align the team around a vision for a new product. Whatever the form, however, teams are prepping and priming themselves to do detailed design and development work.

Discovery is complicated, chaotic, and messy. In discovery, teams gather information about the problem and then explore different ways to tackle it. Through critical thinking, they refine their understanding of the problem and zero-in on a concrete plan for execution. Discovery requires participants to shift attitudes and perspectives almost constantly. Team members go from “tell me more about” to “how about this idea” in the blink of an eye.

To pull this off successfully, team members need to embrace a discovery mindset. This attitude emphasizes learning. It relies on team members maintaining an open mind, questioning everything, and above all not taking themselves too seriously.

In this session, we’ll look at why this attitude is important, how it affects your team’s approach to discovery, and ways you can cultivate this mindset in yourself and those you lead.

About Chicago Camps

Chicago Camps, LLC (chicagocamps.org) was founded in 2012. They plan multiple low cost, high-value events primarily in Chicago.

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"In the Basteal" music written and produced and performed by Christian Lane | @christianlane01

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About Tent Talks

Chicago Camps hosts irregularly scheduled Tent Talks with people from all across the User Experience Design community, and beyond. Who really likes limits, anyway--If it's a cool idea, we'd love to hear about it and share it!

What is a Tent Talk? That's a great question, we'd love to tell you.

Tent Talks are short-form in nature, generally lasting from 10-20 minutes (ish) in a recorded format--we like to think of them as "S'mores-sized content" because that's pretty on-brand. Tent Talks can be a presentation on a topic, a live Q&A session about the work we do, or the work around the work we do, or really just about anything--we don't want to limit ourselves, or you.

You should send along an idea or topic of your own so we can learn from you, as well! You don't have to be a published author or a professional speaker on a circuit to be good at your job, so please, put yourself forward, and let's have some fun, talk, and share your experience with others!