Sessions at SXSW Interactive 2011 about Design on Sunday 13th March

A search on Amazon shows 62,000+ books on leadership but almost nothing to help creative team leaders build and sustain a creative environment. Creativity and innovation can be delicate and emotionally fraught processes. Leadership theories are helpful, but what do you do when your star designer suddenly starts mailing it in? Or a project team is frozen in infighting? Or one of your designers just can't find their footing in a new project? When you got your big promotion for being an amazing designer, no one told you that you needed an entirely new skill set. Sink or swim, baby.

For this session, Sarah B. Nelson gets practical on the topic of creative leadership. From vision development to team alignment, from bottom-up empowerment to top-down intervention, Sarah will inspire you with practical ideas to motivate your team and rouse them to greatness. She will draw on her extensive experience leading creative teams at Adaptive Path and Hot Studio -- and inform the discussion with research and interviews from organizational psychologists, experienced managers, and successful creative leaders.

LEVEL: Advanced

Agile is broken. With large corporations rapidly adopting agile, it is crucial that these teams include designers to create great products. Agile, by its nature, shortcuts the design process without considering the value that design brings, not only in providing on-the-fly design solutions but also crafting the vision of a product that the team can work towards. In the agile framework available to larger companies, there isn’t structure in place that takes into account the work style of design team members. Why is this important? Because design needs more than 5 minutes. How can designers help teams deliver high quality products while grappling with the excruciating constraints of agile? We are designers on an agile team in the corporate world. These are our stories of triumph and tragedy. Come hear what worked for us and share your own war stories.

LEVEL: Intermediate

In the real world, coming up with a breakthrough idea doesn’t mean it will get to market. By nature, innovative ideas are different and represent new ways of thinking. Getting stakeholders to recognize the value of these market-shaking ideas, buy into and support them, and agree to build them, requires a new kind of design skill: facilitation. This session will show how leading innovation workshops (collaborative design workshops) not only brings UX to the strategy table, but it invents a new table at which strategic ideation and dialog can take place constructively.

In this session, two designers will show how they have lead very different types of innovation workshops to generate creative new ideas, get stakeholders aligned around those ideas, and drive those innovations to market. They will share their favorite methods for getting cross-functional groups to ideate, filter ideas using the innovation funnel, and align organizations around a common vision for breakthrough evolution. They will also post instructions for conducting successful innovation workshops.

This presentation will highlight the advantages and disadvantages of visual and non-visual augmented reality. We’ll cover alternate types of augmented reality techniques and how they have been saving us time in the past few months. We’ll demonstrate how we’ve been merging available technologies with custom programming to create location-aware social networks with custom proximity notification. Finally, we’ll describe other uses for location sharing, such as automatically turning off house lights when leaving for work, wayfinding with piezoelectric buzzers, geonotes and other mashups that can be done using sms, gps, x-10 and irc as a control hub.

LEVEL: Intermediate

Disruptive technologies and corroding trust in business have combined turn Marshall McLuhan’s adage “the medium is the message” inside out. Information now spreads laterally, triggered not by institution but by individual. The message is the messenger. This panel will explore how four individuals are reshaping the design, consulting, PR and journalism industries by understanding how information is consumed today.

LEVEL: Beginner

There is a significant gap between intentions and outcomes related to pregnancy; young adults say overwhelmingly that while they don’t want to get pregnant right now, they also are not fully protecting themselves from pregnancy by the careful, consistent use of contraception.

This session is about a program designed to address that gap called Bedsider.

We’ll talk about why the gap exists and look at established theories of behavior change for ways to approach the problem.

We’ll denote a knowledge gap but offer that for most people, intentions are good.  Sex is complicated, messy, emotional, and driven by desire.  Yet most keep trying to attack the problem with logic.  They speak like doctors, appeal to reason, and show pictures of smiling people who look like they’re about to buy a car.

This session will detail how to apply design thinking to the problem and re-frame birth control.  For most, sex education usually comes at the wrong time, in the wrong context, in the wrong voice.  How might a different tone and branding of birth control affect adherence?  And how do you test for it in developing a program? We will address those questions in our session.

We’ll talk about how Bedsider has to fit in visually and verbally—it can’t look like the health department—and the role that language plays in attacking the excuses to not use birth control.  In this session we’ll also address how to design for feedback in an area where “nothing” is the usual reward.

LEVEL: Advanced

He brought us The Web Standards Project, A List Apart, Designing With Web Standards, A Book Apart, and so much more. Now legendary blogger, designer, and creative gadfly Jeffrey Zeldman brings us a SXSW panel. There will be discussion. There will be special guests. Quotable insights will fly faster than your fingers can peck them into Twitterific. Combustible wit will fill the room. And in the end, we'll all be a little wiser than we were.

LEVEL: Advanced

Hundreds of new typefaces are released every year by hundreds of vendors. Some of these fonts are good for nuts-and-bolts text, some for showing off. Some work well on the web, while most are just awful. A select few are destined to be classics. The sheer volume and variety of options can be overwhelming. So, understandably, most designers just stick to the same old safe standbys they’ve always used — the ones that came with their computer or they learned about in school. The panelists, all typographic experts, will show how they broke free of tired text, sharing their secrets for selecting type, including best practices and personal case studies.

LEVEL: Intermediate