Nathan Shedroff, Richard Anderson, Peter Coughlan

Nathan Shedroff is the head of the newly-minted MBA in Design Strategy at CCA. his presentation was primarily focused on innovation in business. Innovation is a form of growth, but it’s the form of growth that traditional MBAs know the least about. Enter the Designer as CEO. He made a point of the fact that his slides can be picked up on AP and on his site, so no big details here, but one take-away: Key ways for businesses to stay innvative in a changing global economy–improve your ethnographic understanding and take a dimensionalized approach to meaning.

Richard Anderson Posed a series of questions, primarily supported by the presentations that a series of other UX leaders had given while appearing in, of course, his college course at UCSC. INteresting, thoght provoking, but to be honest, some of the other presentations were far more engaging. I’d rather spend time with Richard, talking about the issues, getting in deeper.

Peter Coughlan is a bigwig at IDEO. He heads up their organization transformation capabilities. He gave some great examples of how extremely bad and extremely good experiences can teach us how to design our own projects and frame our approach to organizational development. Peter’s presentaitonis wrapped up after the jump.

1. Find out what people really care about
2. Design the new offer before you redesign the organization (basically set a clear goal)
3. Get a lot of different players involved
4. Start now, start small (prototype with reckless abandon)
5. Be tangible (this speaks directly to Chip Heath’s notion of being concrete)

After demonstrating how a hospital provided him with a confusing, scary, and uncomfortable experience because it had no design to it, he mentioned going to a conference at a resort hotel whose expereicne was far to overdone, stiff, scripted, and left no room for improvisation.

Experience happens, but not always the way we intended it to…

1. Understand what customers and employees care about
2. Embrace UCD Principles & let them drive you
3. Prototype new experiences in real time