Shifting team culture

Live election coverage is a huge opportunity for NBC News and MSNBC to deliver fast, accurate results across television graphics, interactive boards, websites, mobile apps and social media. In previous election cycles, design collaboration has been limited as teams operated separately with unique design systems and tools. As audiences have shifted to watching the election unfold not just on-air but across a variety of platforms, we saw an opportunity to unite and make sure we delivered what our audience needed, where they needed it, all using a common language.

Collaborative creativity is a theory that tries to describe why working together in the open can feel so magical and why it thrives best in environments where people can not only share their ideas early and often but where people are encouraged to *create* in the same spaces together.

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory wanted to help the country and the world through innovation, space technology, and engineering. Kat Park shares how engineers leveraged the skills of design and illustration to think through their thinking, and facilitate rapid development in a remote environment.

Christoph and Johns, contributors to the Bitcoin Design Guide, explore the idea of open design, to bring more designers into the space, and to help open-source projects adopt better design processes.

By shifting power from designers to users, we start to correct for designers' biases and blindspots, especially if they don't have lived experience with the issue they are trying to solve. By doing so, we also start to change to the design process to be more equitable, inclusive, and reflective of diverse voices. In this session, we’ll hear stories about imbalances with the design process and how they affected outcomes, reflect on moments of discomfort we have had with our power as designers, and explore tools (both personal and team based) we can start implementing in our work to correct for our biases/blindspots and start shifting power to users.

What if we viewed projects less as a baton pass between disciplines and more like a team road trip? The concept of road tripping envisions collaborators riding along together, switching drivers as the project progresses. While one discipline drives, the passengers stay engaged to support and contribute ideas. After all, what is a road trip without a trusty co-pilot to D.J., open snacks and help navigate along the journey?

There’s so much going on all around us and it has been that way for over a year now. Nothing we’ve experienced is “normal times” or “business as usual” and I think it’s about time that we admit that, if we haven’t already, especially at work.

Reflections on overcoming ego and apathy and what Pablo has learned along the way.

Racism and inequity in education are products of design, thus, they can be redesigned. And since more than half of US K-12 classrooms have a computer for every student, tech can be a catalyst for this change when used responsibly. However, it requires making tweaks to our traditional human-centered-design methods. We’ll share a set of tools from the Equity Lab on how to add a racial conscious lens when designing for any industry — while having some fun along the way.

In this talk, Shanique will share how she learned to let go of her design darlings, get comfortable sharing scrappy explorations, and discover the lessons that come from failures.

In this talk, he’ll share his first-level experience of a team going from small to large in a very small timeframe and include findings from other designers. Whether you’re an individual contributor or a people manager, this talk will share the top problems scaling design teams face, how you can anticipate them, and be prepared to face them.