This week on The Digital Life, we chat about the themes and take aways from the BIF2015 and Big Design conferences.

At BIF 2015, the Business Innovation Factory annual gathering in Providence, RI, personal stories intertwined with tales of innovation and design. One of the primary themes was innovation in education — a social design critical to the future. Storytellers included Jaime Casap, Chief Education Evangelist at Google, who spoke from his own experience about how education disrupts poverty in one generation, and Sophie Houser co-creator of Tampon Run and Girls Who Code alum discussed the power of technology to create discussion and social change.

While at Big Design, the multi-faceted conference for user experience and usability professionals, digital marketers, designers, content strategists and developers, the conversation incorporated not just the digital, but also emerging technologies like robotics.

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Business Innovation Factory
Big Design

On this episode of The Digital Life, we discuss open organization culture in theory and in practice. As the creative economy continues to grow and evolve, knowledge workers are discovering and developing new ways of working together. In contrast with the closed, hierarchical structures of 20th century industrial enterprises, in the 21st century open organization, transparency, authenticity and access are foundational elements.

But how do these open source organizational principals really work in a business context? Join us as we examine the impact of the open organization, on companies small and large.

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What is the Open Organization?
Here’s Why Whole Foods Lets Employees Look Up Each Other’s Salaries

In this episode of The Digital Life, we explore helping companies infuse design and UX strategy into their culture and structure, with special guest, entrepreneur, product designer, and AI expert, Giuseppe Taibi.

Many companies are constructed to do one thing well — efficiently produce their current products or services. But this kind of focus can oftentimes create overwhelming inertia against change and innovation.

Today, there is a significant trend toward companies building their own in house design and UX teams, some of them for the first time. However, introducing user experience and design culture, and making a company more customer-centric in its thinking, is an investment that requires patience and experimentation. It’s a multi-point process that happens over time — requiring buy-in across the organization, from the executive level to the managers to the doers and makers on the front lines. Join us as we discuss some real life scenarios that we’ve encountered introducing design into companies.

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Giuseppe Taibi

Robots are ideal for taking care of jobs that are repetitive, physically demanding, and potentially hazardous to humans. There are immediate, significant opportunities for using advanced robotics in energy, health, and manufacturing. Designers working in robotics will need to help identify the major challenges in these areas and seek proactive solutions — not an obvious or easy task.

In this episode of The Digital Life we discuss the future of UX for robotics, and interview Scott Stropkay and Bill Hartman of the design firm Essential, on human-robot interactions. This interview aired originally on O’Reilly Radar.

Resources
Essential Design
Designing for Emerging Technologies