Speakers

Ben Fullerton

: Designing for Solitude

The world we experience every day bombards us with requests for connectivity from many angles, requests that it seems we feel pressured to respond to. And some of us have no doubt had some responsibility for designing it that way. But is the inability to switch off and disconnect losing us anything valuable as humans?

Ben will talk through a couple of stories from both history and the present day that suggest that considering what happens when the button is in the off position might be just as important for us.

Workshops: Good Design Faster, Day Two (a two-day workshop)

Good Design Faster is a two-day workshop that helps you understand how to get ideas out of your head, onto paper, and into a prototype format with remarkable quickness. Because you’ll be working in groups, it’s best for everyone if you take the full two-day workshop.

We are working in a world of rich, dynamic interfaces, both on the web and on our devices. The experiences we design are interactive, responsive, and have emotion. Prototypes allow us to articulate the feeling and function of a design in a way that a wireframe does not.

Building on the design learnings from Day One of Good Design Faster, you’ll learn techniques to develop tangible versions of your ideas. You’ll see how your sketchboard materials can serve as a basis for your prototype and how to scope for the right fidelity.

On Day Two, we’ll start by introducing the importance of prototyping to a design process. Through a short presentation we’ll discuss how the use of many small prototypes can better inform the design of a system than one large prototype. Specifically, we will show that:

- Effective prototypes are fast. We want to use techniques that allow for rapid iteration. A prototype should not just be bolted onto the end of a design process. Incorporating the creation of a prototype into your daily design work allows new ideas to emerge and validates concepts quickly.

- Effective prototypes are disposable. Just like with any design deliverable, we are creating an artifact intended to express an idea to someone else (stakeholder, developer, user, etc). Once that design idea has been communicated, the prototype deliverable can be discarded. We don’t have to feel the burden of creating a masterpiece that will live on, and we don’t need to build the final product just for testing.

- Effective prototypes are focused. We want to select the interactions of our design that really need to be prototyped. Look for the parts of your design that have of complexity. Look for interaction patterns repeated throughout the user’s experience. Look for the interactions that bring revenue to your product. A prototype that demonstrates these interactions will be the best use of your time and energy.

There are many, many, many tools for prototyping. We’ll demonstrate a few methods and discuss the pros and the cons. You will learn how to select the right tools and techniques for your specific team, organization, process and problem.

After the morning’s overview, participants will break into their teams and begin to build paper prototypes. A mid-day pause will demonstrate the need to test a prototype with sample “users”. Following the test, iteration on the prototype will incorporate feedback and ultimately result in something that can be presented. Everyone will leave with a working prototype that they can show to others and the skills to incorporate this into their daily work.

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Ben Fullerton is an experience designer at Adaptive Path. His career has meandered down a windy road from its origins on the web in early 2000, taking in mobile, brand, application, service and strategy work at consultancies and in-house design teams, from startups to corporate behemoths.

Prior to Adaptive Path, Ben was at design consultancy IDEO, where he worked within multidisciplinary teams on projects spanning web, service, strategy and devices for both private and public sector clients. Before IDEO, Ben moved from his native United Kingdom to the Bay Area and spent a short, but rewarding time at Twitter defining features as the then-small service was first beginning to find popularity in the wider world.

Ben was based in London for eleven years, more recently within the mobile team at Samsung’s European design studio, where he provided insight and design direction to Samsung’s Corporate Design Center in Seoul. He came to Samsung after spending many years at pioneering service design and innovation consultancy live|work, which he joined as one of the first employees. It was at live|work that Ben first gained experience in service design — bringing the skills of interaction designers to bear on experiences that occur over time and over many different points of use — at a time when the parameters and methods of such a design engagement were still somewhat ill-defined within the wider design community.

Ben met the founders of live|work at his previous position with digital agency Oyster Partners (later Framfab, now LBi), who, at one time, were one of the largest new media firms in the UK. At Oyster, Ben helped to nurture and grow the capabilities of the front end engineering team (while also sitting through the first technology crash.)

Ben holds a Bachelor of Arts (Hons.) in Contemporary Literature and a Master of Arts from the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London, where he studied the cultural implications of the development of technology with a focus on how people experience material culture. Projects that Ben has worked on have been nominated for a BAFTA and have won a Spark Award, among others.

Outside of work Ben neatly conforms to national stereotypes by spending far too much time attempting to educate people on the immeasurable benefits of a decent cup of tea, and still believes in the zeppelin as a viable form of intercontinental transport. One day he will finish writing a book.