Sense-making & Strategy: With Will Evans

We are very pleased to have convinced the awesome Will Evans (https://twitter.com/semanticwill) to visit Melbourne in October. He's agreed to give the following talk.

Sense-making & Strategy:

Framing Applied Complexity Thinking from a UX Designer's Perspective

Designers make explicit the normally implicit processes of sense-making and framing during collaborative research, visioning, affinity diagramming, story telling, as they attempt to make meaning out of research data through interpretation and modeling. Hopefully, through a rigorous process of sense-making and framing, we can come to know the nature of a system, of people within that system, and collaboratively come to see and test our underlying assumptions about what we posit to be people’s problems and craft strategies and products to solve them.

For those of you familiar with Dave Snowden's Cynefin sense-making framework, the above paragraph must be setting off a lot of connections in your head right now; the previous paragraph on design thinking acting as a catalytic probe which your pre-frontal cortex matched to previously known positive patterns. This talk will explore the connections between design research, design thinking, and Cynefin. Using case studies based on experience at The Library Corporation and TLCLabs, we'll explore decision making and management under conditions of friction, adversity and uncertainty within a two thousand year old industry.

Will's Bio

Will Evans is the Director of User Experience Design at The Library Corporation as well as TLCLabs, the enterprise innovation lab. At TLC, Will is responsible for working across the organization to create extraordinary user experiences and new product innovations. Will is also the Design Thinker-in-Residence at NYU Stern's Berkley Center for Innovation.

Before TLC, he led experience design and research for TheLadders in New York City. He has over 15 years industry experience in interaction design, information architecture, and user experience strategy. His experiences includes directing UX for social network analytics & terrorism modeling at AIR Worldwide, UX Architect for social media site Gather.com, and UX Architect for travel search engine Kayak.com. He worked at Lotus/IBM where he was the senior information architect, and for Curl - a DARPA-funded MIT project when he was at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.

Will's work in research and design has been featured in numerous publications including Business Week, The Economist, Business Insider, Fast Company, Time Magazine, Fortune, MSNBC, Fox Business and the Wall Street Journal.