December: Designing for Disruptive Innovation

Our very own Robert Barlow-Busch, co-champion of uxWaterloo, spoke last month by invitation of Jared Spool at UX Thursday (http://uxthursday.com/events/toronto-2014) in Toronto. If you missed that event, here's your chance to catch Bob's talk, which people described as informative, inspiring, and entertaining. Join us and find out if it's true!

Sometimes we get so focused on winning the small victories of the present — like sign-off on UX or design support — that we fail to plan for a project’s bigger challenges.

Robert Barlow-Busch journeyed with a team who faced the possibility of failure after ignoring something big: the future. In this talk, Robert will share how:

• Having higher-ups support design and research can impact a project

• Bringing colleagues along for a design journey will turn them into evangelists

• Destroying a team’s assumptions might be a designer’s most important contribution

About the speaker

Robert has spent over 20 years as an interaction designer with one foot in the marketing world. He’s now leading the charge in both worlds as Chief Experience Officer of MetaMarketplace (https://www.metamarketplace.com/). He’s busy building Ontario’s design community as co-chair of the Fluxible (http://www.fluxible.ca/) conference and co-champion of uxWaterloo.

You can find Robert’s ideas in books such as User-Centered Design Stories (http://www.amazon.com/User-Centered-Design-Stories-Interactive-Technologies/dp/0123706084?tag=userinterface-20) and The Persona Lifecycle (http://www.amazon.com/Persona-Lifecycle-Throughout-Interactive-Technologies-ebook/dp/B006OM89KQ?tag=userinterface-20).