April Geek Night: Spaces, Teams and Culture

We have another ripper event coming up in April. There are three awesome speakers lined up, who each bring a unique perspective on design and research.

This one will be our maiden voyage at General Assembly on William Street. There will be flavoursome beverages and perhaps something delicious.

We have the following speakers raring to go for April:

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Amir Ansari, Head of UX at b2cloud
Topic: Some is better than none (qualitative research)

In the last 10 months, while mentoring some great design practitioners, Amir has come across two polar opposite situations. One, where the designer is struggling to sell the importance and benefits of just getting a single handful of users to provide feedback on their products; and the other, where stakeholders feel a handful is statistically insignificant and they want their designer to cover a large sample size.

In this talk Amir will tell some stories and share the advice he gives in helping designers convince their stakeholders or clients that some qualitative research is better than none.

Amir has over 10,000+ hours of design and design leadership experience and loves to empower individuals and companies to use the design process to solve problems.

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Catherine Hills, UX Lead at REA Group
Topic: How a UX team can bring change and Agile behaviour into the pre and post delivery conversation

Catherine is a UX Lead at REA Group in Melbourne Australia and a research candidate at Melbourne's RMIT, where she is undertaking a research study in information systems, UX design and HCI. Formally trained as a fine artist then designer and coder, Catherine began her career in interaction and experience design over 15 years ago. Since then she has gone on to work for digital agencies, publishing companies, educational organisations and startups. Catherine is passionate about learning, user/human-centred design and is an advocate of lean, agile and design-thinking methods.

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Agustin Chevez, Senior Researcher at Hassell
Topic: Workplaces of the future

An architect and academic, Dr Agustin Chevez has dedicated his career to understanding the notion of work and uncovering environments that best support our working lives. He is driven to discover how work has shaped our civilisation and given purpose to our very existence. Along his journey of discovery, Agustin has worked as a project manager, architect, lecturer and researcher within both academia and industry. Currently Senior Researcher at architecture firm HASSELL and an Adjunct Research Fellow at Swinburne University’s Centre for Design Innovation, Agustin believes an adventurous mind can turn paralysing fear into unstoppable drive and also take you to places – both physical and mental – that could not have been reached otherwise.

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We have established a code of conduct for our community! We know that this is super important to many people out there and it's important for us to articulate it too. We will publish the long version of our code of conduct with the next revision of our Melbourne Geeks website.

Here it is:

Event Code of Conduct
All attendees, speakers, sponsors and volunteers at our events are required to agree with the following code of conduct. Organisers will enforce this code throughout the event. We expect cooperation from all participants to help ensure a safe environment for everybody.

The Quick Version
Our event is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment of event participants in any form. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any event venue, including talks, workshops, parties, Twitter and other online media. Event participants violating these rules may be expelled from the event without a refund (where a fee is incurred) at the discretion of the event organisers.