Envisioning the Future with Teams Bogged in the Past

As designers and visionaries, our job is to explore what's possible for tomorrow, within domain spaces that aren't our own. We're pressured to discover answers to questions we don't know to ask and the quality of our concepts and recommendations are only as strong as the problem details we're able to uncover.

This is where our subject matter experts—end users, project leads, and domain space veterans—are both valuable and hindering. We know we need what's in their brains, but they're blinded by today and yesterday. "We've always done it this way," is the default barrier from ease-of-use and progress.

In this talk, Anthony will share by example, how his team is innovating in a space that's literally hundreds of years old (the railroad), to help preserve and advance a people and culture being threatened by new technologies. He'll expose some of the workshop facilitation techniques he'd used to get fresh and open-minded ideas out of the most pessimistic of participants—to maximize your understanding of the mega (and not so mega) design problems you're grappling with every day.

Anthony is a futurist and UX researcher for GE Transportation's digital products. He's helping the railroads of the world explore the relationships between humans, robots, artificial intelligence, sensors, and predictive analytics, to compete with and complement emerging delivery networks like drones and driverless trucks. Outside of the office, he's a regular community speaker on a variety of research, design, and usability topics. Find him anywhere by Googling “anthonydpaul”.