March 2018: Beyond the Hype: Transformative Entrepreneurial and Intrapreneurial Design

This month, we’re excited to have speaker Karel Vredenburg of IBM Design join us.

From start-ups to large enterprises, everyone is talking about innovation, disruption, transformation, design thinking, iconic branding, signature experiences, as well as things like artificial intelligence, machine learning, audio interfaces, big data, IoT, VR, and AR. There’s a lot of hype, a lot of excitement, and a lot of money being spent but little focus on the fundamentals and what really makes a difference. We’ll briefly review the history of design and the interface to technology from the point of view of a 106 year old startup, IBM, and then explore the common transformation myths, and the key foundational ingredients for effective design transformation by examining entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial companies. We’ll also discuss the design challenges inherent in several new technologies and proposals to address them. We’ll finish up with an open discussion with the session attendees to solicit their ideas, thoughts, and feedback on the topics raised during the session.

Karel’s Bio

Karel has spent his professional career dealing with design, technology, human affect, cognition, and behavior primarily through the human interface to technology. His current interests are in advances in design practice, design-based organizational transformation, the innovation ecosystem (design school, business school, university, entrepreneur, and enterprise), and the ways in which technology can extend, optimize, and improve work, play, relationships, education, health, and overall fulfillment. He is director of design at IBM and responsible for IBM Design’s worldwide client programs and serves as the head of IBM Studios in Canada. He’s also Industry Professor at the DeGroote School of Business, the DeGroote Health Leadership Academy, and McMaster University. Karel joined IBM in 1988 after having done graduate studies, research, and teaching at the University of Toronto. He introduced User-Centered Design at IBM in 1993 and assumed a company-wide role in 1995 leading IBM’s community of designers, leading the development of design methods, languages, and technologies, and leading the design of the commercialization of the IBM Watson. In 2013, he introduced IBM Design Thinking to IBM product development laboratories worldwide and introduced a tailored version of it to IBM consulting services and technology services organizations worldwide in 2014 through 2016. Karel now leads the development and activation of IBM Design Thinking for client facing professionals worldwide in addition to providing leadership to IBM’s Canadian design studios. Karel is based in Toronto, blogs at karelvredenburg.com, hosts a podcast called Life Habits, and his social media coordinates include @karelvredenburg on Twitter and LinkedIn and @karelveganburg on Instagram.

Pizza and drinks will be served at the event.

Please register for this free event

Thursday March 15, 2018
5:30pm to 7:00pm
3rd Floor Theatre, Roddenberry, Communitech
151 Charles Street West
Kitchener, Ontario

Job: User Experience (UX) Lead, Carnegie Technologies

At Carnegie Technologies, we are a strong technical team that builds communications products for the multitude of networks available today. Whether that’s combining LTE and Wi-Fi together for better-quality VoIP calls that aren’t disrupted when you switch networks, aggregating networks together for smoother video streaming, giving your smartphone the ability to place calls over satellite from anywhere on the planet, or constructing end-to-end IoT systems that take advantage of the latest wireless protocols, we’re always looking for ways to get the best experience at the lowest operational cost.

We come from many different backgrounds and levels of expertise – but to all of us, craft and functionality are equally important. We constantly learn and hone our skills and incorporate those experiences into every line of code. We don’t ship “fast” solutions – we ship the right ones for our customers. We’re also leaders that create quiet time to solve hard problems and the space to focus on the best result.

Our engineering team is spread across our offices in Kitchener-Waterloo, Canada; Austin, Texas; and Romsey, UK. You’ll have the opportunity to work with our super talented team of people, from experts in networking, machine learning, and applications to some of the pioneers of Wi-Fi itself. You might even get your name on a patent!

UX at Carnegie

The UX Lead will be responsible for tackling the UX challenges across all facets of our product portfolio, like those we’ve worked on in the past year:

• Visualizing a wide variety of Internet-of-Things devices on mobile phones, tablets, and laptops
• Eliciting user preferences on cost versus performance when aggregating bandwidth
• Guiding users through pointing a satellite antenna towards the closest satellite
• Distilling the information from dozens of IoT devices into simple, actionable alerts
• Explaining the difference between single-flow and multi-flow bandwidth aggregation, visually
• Designing the “out of the box” experiences for new sensors
• Communicating success and errors using minimal LEDs on hardware devices
• Preventing activation of satellite emergency services by accident, but not introducing delay in a real emergency
• Visualizing sensor locations in urban, rural, and indoor environments using different types of maps
• Designing mobile web apps for multiple screens devices that don’t feel “lowest common denominator”
• Testing applications with outdoor workers, in rural locations, in the middle of summer. In Texas.

The Role

The UX lead will be responsible for interaction design and user testing across our product lines.

• You’ll be a player, and a coach – actively designing the user experience of our products, and leading others to achieve the best result
• When you are designing, you’ll be designing user interfaces, developing pattern libraries, eliciting requirements from our product teams, writing personas and user stories, troubleshooting existing designs, and doing hallway usability tests
• When you are leading, you’ll be doing design reviews, setting internal best practices, locating great UX teams to work with, building our internal team, and coordinating UX activities
• Your early wireframes will be quick sketches on paper, on a whiteboard, or with other tools – to elicit ideas or to explore a concept
• You’ll do later designs in HTML – to capture interactive elements of the design, and hand them off for implementation to our development teams
• You’ll initially be the only UX professional at Carnegie – but lead a global set of UX teams working on specific products and industry verticals
• You’ll be working across all our products – network convergence, IoT, and Satellite (and more to come)
• You’ll be pushed by your colleagues to deliver quality products in a reasonable timeframe – and trusted to seek input from then take the best action

About You

• You have a wide knowledge of user experience/human factors/interaction design/user interfaces – through a related degree or diploma, or practical experience
• You are self-motivated and independent, and excel at taking high-level guidance and just getting things done
• You have very strong verbal and written communications skills
• You are comfortable programming in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript – enough to be dangerous, though you won’t need to work on production code
• You are comfortable working with visual design tools, whether Photoshop, Illustrator, or others – though you’ll work with our marketing team on the final look and feel
• You are experienced with writing and maintaining personas, scenarios, user story maps, and other artifacts that place the design in context
• You have deep knowledge of designing for mobile, including multi-screen and multi-device limitations
• You have experience working in a cross-functional role, bringing together engineering and product to make applications that delight users
• You are comfortable using version control (we use Git), video conferencing, Slack, and running commands on the command line
• You have some experience leading a UX team and shipping products
• You want to work in a small, fast-moving team with lots of responsibility (and few roadblocks to getting things done)
• You want to understand how the Internet works at a deep level, and why rebooting your router fixes it when it breaks

Work Location

You’ll be working out of our office in Kitchener-Waterloo, Canada, with occasional travel to our office in Austin, Texas

Apply Now

Send your resume and a few examples of your work to dev-jobs@carnegietechnologies.com

February 2018: Understanding problem spaces, with Indi Young

We’re delighted that past Fluxible speaker Indi Young will be joining us for a remote session on understanding problem spaces.

For Indi, the problem space is about understanding people and their larger purpose. Exploration of these spaces comes with letting go of thinking of solutions for a time. In todays presentation and discussion, Indi will outline what a problem space is, how to navigate the ambiguity of the problem space with empathy, and demonstrate techniques to explore problems and bring creative solutions. Join us, and bring along some questions for Indi.

Indi Young is the author of two books, Practical Empathy and Mental Models, and has presented at over 40 conferences worldwide — did we mention Fluxible? In 2001, Young co-founded Adaptive Path, a groundbreaking UX agency with the mission to transform communities through design. Young received her bachelors in computer science from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. In her early projects, Young realized that there was a gap between what her team knew, as engineers and creators, and what people were trying to ultimately accomplish. Young’s career has been dedicated to closing this gap.

Please register for this free event

Thursday February 15, 2018
5:30pm to 7:00pm
3rd Floor Theatre, Roddenberry, Communitech
151 Charles Street West
Kitchener, Ontario