World Usability Day 2019: Designing for the Future We Want

Please RSVP on Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.nl/e/tickets-world-usability-day-amsterdam-2019-80139741123
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We've united once again with Amsterdam UX to celebrate World Usability Day 2019 together.

How can creatives persuade people to consume more sustainably? How can design support the transition to renewable energy sources? How can design help in achieving the United Nations sustainable development goals?

In other words, how do we design a future we want? That's the question we are asking ourselves in this year's World Usability Event. As in previous editions, we will be looking for insights, ideas and guides we can translate into our daily practice as designers.

We have invited speakers who will share their experience of putting the SDGs in the center of their work and how it affects their practices.
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TALKS
# Resilient Urban Application by Indranil Bhattacharya

Policy makers, businesses, and citizens in cities face challenges like rapid urbanization and climate change, and there is an urgent need for digital applications that are sensitive to these changes. From mobility to food logistics, and from healthcare to urban planning, digital solutions require adaptive and progressive growth with a city’s changing needs. Moving beyond greenfield agility and opaque monetization agendas in black-box systems, digital urban applications are required that can progressively withstand complex urban challenges with resilience.

# Service Design for social innovation in vulnerable contexts by Valentina Salvi

Valentina is using Service Design for social innovation in vulnerable contexts. She recently visited Uganda on behalf of the charity ‘Plan International’ to understand how as a charity, they can support marginalised girls in rural areas of Uganda to secure sustainable employment / entrepreneurship, whilst at the same time positively impacting the environment.

# Speculative design by Theo Ploeg

The future is uncertain. Recent environmental, societal and technological developments give us a hard time understanding the changes our world goes through. A focus on products, services, and customers isn’t enough anymore. We have to invest in more meaningful relationships with the world around. The SDGs give us a framework for that. But how do we integrate them in our practice?

Speculative design, mapping the future in a meaningful way, might be a solution. Instead of focusing on problems in the present it imagines how developments change over time and affect the near future.
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SPEAKERS

Indranil Bhattacharya has been working on developing digital experiences and infrastructure for Resilient Urban Software using a knowledge-oriented methodology for the past four years. Prior to building digital urban solutions, he built knowledge-based systems in Manufacturing, Telecommunications, Logistics, Human Resources, Farming, Healthcare, and Retail in large and complex environments. His practice lives in the intersection of philosophy, engineering, and art, and his primary interest is creating self-sustaining bottom-up systems.

Valentina Salvi is an Italian designer and researcher who loves shaping meaningful experiences that people love. She specialises in creative facilitation by using the fundamentals of human-centred design to help teams innovate effectively. Valentina has been the users’ advocate within a diverse range of Service Design projects: from social innovation challenges in vulnerable contexts to commercial work for global clients like KLM, Shell, Liander, Arcadis. Check out her Medium page for hands-on insights: https://medium.com/@valentina.v.salvi

Theo Ploeg is ambassador Speculative Design at Digital Society School. He tells stories about possible futures. As a media and design sociologist, he uses speculative design as an attitude to investigate and explore the near future and bring his findings back to the now. He teaches at different media and design schools.