Influencing Strategy by Design

Advanced

This half-day course will teach designers how to contribute to the direction of their company by synthesising and articulating clear, actionable business and product strategies. Often, growth opportunities for designers are artificially limited by org charts that fail to fully capitalise on the galvanising role that design can have beyond product or marketing. This course empowers designers by giving them tools to impact strategy by illuminating important decision-drivers like market or user research, web analytics, financials, and product reports.

This hands-on course is created for experienced designers, enabling them to influence and improve strategic decision-making within their department or company. They will learn principles for communicating and influencing strategy, along with practising skills and techniques through group activities, and working directly with Luke. This course will maximise a designer’s ability to help their organisation make better decisions.

• Apply your existing design skills to strategy development and execution.
• Help your organisation make better decisions.
• Manage organisational dynamics to get things done.
• Take advantage of metrics to help frame and broaden your understanding of problems.
• Utilise pattern recognition to identify meaningful relationships and insights within data.
• Employ design techniques to communicate with multiple domains and levels.
• Make effective executive presentations.

First Person User Interfaces

First person interfaces allow people to interact with the real world as they are currently experiencing it. These applications layer information on top of people's immediate view of the world and turn the objects and people around them into interactive elements. First person interfaces enable people to interact with the real world through a set of "always on" sensors. Simply place a computing device in a specific location, near a specific object or person, and automatically get relevant output based on who you are, where you are, and who or what is near you.

As interface design paradigms have progressed over time, they consistently reduced the amount of abstraction between input and output. From punched cards to the always on sensors that power FPIs -the amount of overhead required to access information and perform actions has decreased exponentially. This trend is enabling a new class of applications to thrive that allow people to access and manage information with minimum effort and where it is most relevant. Google Vice President of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, said it well: "these are early examples of what's possible when you pair sensor-rich devices with resources in the cloud. [...] But something has changed. Computing has changed. And the possibilities inspire us."