Did you miss UXCampOttawa? Don’t despair. You can read all about it online. Meghan has posted all of her notes, Cornelius has linked the program to speakers’s slides, and Barb has blogged about 3 recurring themes of the day.
Lots of folks are posting their takeaways from the day, like this the crew from Industrial Media. I figured it’s time to stop ignoring my blog and get back to sharing.
Having spent the last year working in policy rather than the hands-on stuff that I normally do, the most relevant presentation to me was Jess McMullin‘s talk on Citizen Experience (linked) and embedded below.
I also attended his full-day workshop called Service Design for the Public Sector. We learned skills to take with us to work on Monday, a bit of theory and also considered the implication of calling citizens ‘customers’ or ‘clients’. Jess clarified the connection between some artefacts I’d read about on my own, but wasn’t quite sure how to use.
If you want to know a bit more, you can also check also out an earlier presentation of his – Putting the Citizen Back Into Citizen-Centric (linked) and embedded below.
User experience design as a practice is very popular, especially amongst web designers. And while I don’t know what this event is about exactly, I wasn’t surprised to see it either. Design thinking is definitely in the air.
That said, the need for design thinking still doesn’t seem to have caught on with those who don’t consider themselves “designers”. I can’t figure out why, since these tools can be used to approach problems and solutions from a new perspective. More than practical tools, it’s a mindset and a way to make decisions. Why not use any and all tools are our disposal?
The next frontier, Jess told us Saturday, is to apply design thinking to making policy. (He’s even published a paper about it in a book.) I’m area I can’t stop thinking about, and yet, can’t quite figure out either. It kinda blows my mind.
According to Jess, using design thinking to create experiences for citizens releases the power of :
- possibility
- real world iteration
- seeing systems
- visualizing and making
- iteration
- co-design
Above all, it’s about making meaning for people. Afterall, isn’t that why we’re here?
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