Workshops

Gain insights on how to apply service design principles in a complex industry, where multiple actors meet in the physical and digital world.

The customer journey. Such a trivial concept when making the physical journey. But when the services are scattered and crowded with different actors, and businesses, during each and every touchpoint of the way, how do you actually utilise the insights you gain from mapping the steps of a customer? When in an environment where you have limited control of the events occuring to your customer, how do you create a holistic user experience?

This, and other insights from service design in the aviation industry, will be discussed in the workshop lead by Reaktor’s senior designers, who are experienced in creating outstanding digital services for airlines. As a participant of the workshop, you’ll also part-take in hands-on exercises, where you’ll learn to take a holistic view on the user experience over a set of services.

Outline:

• Understanding holistic service design - when physical and digital go hand-in-hand
• How the digital can, and cannot, transform the aviation industry
• Putting the customer first - applying service design principles to the aviation industry
• Practical examples from services created by Reaktor

Target audience:

• Anyone who’s practicing design, or creating digital products that solve real-life problems in the physical world
• Designers who want to see, and share, perspectives in applying service design principles in aviation
• Anyone who’s interested in tackling complex problems in a complicated industry

Duration: 5 hours including lunch break

Learn about the ideal contexts for voice interfaces, hone their listening and speaking skills by critiquing dialogues, craft a voice personality, and use improvisational techniques to design and structure conversations.

If machine intelligence is taking over the world, voice interfaces (VUIs) are a close second. Fortunately, the evolution of human speech makes most of us terrific listeners and speakers, especially when compared to machines. Unfortunately, while our brains are wired for speech, designing a VUI still takes work.

Modern voice interfaces are an opportunity to create better products in new contexts. Smart adoption of VUIs in the right environments makes interaction simple, pleasurable, accessible, and lowers cognitive load. And voice interfaces fulfill the vision of ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things - keeping our attention on the people around us rather than devices.

In this hands-on workshop, participants will learn about the ideal contexts for voice interfaces, hone their listening and speaking skills by critiquing dialogues, craft a voice personality, and use improvisational techniques to design and structure conversations.

Each workshop team will test the effectiveness and enjoyability of their prototyped voice interfaces using the Wizard of Oz methods practiced by teams at Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. And each participant will take home resources useful for future VUI work.

Join us to expand your design skills with a new interaction tool that’s as old as humanity: voice.

You will learn:

• How to design a VUI
• How designing ‘conversation’ differs from screen interactions
• Understanding of how to prototype voice with Wizard of Oz methods

Target audience:

• This workshop is for anyone curious about working in voice, including designers, decision-makers, and engineers who are interested in ubiquitous computing, calm technology, bots, NO-UI, and thinking outside of the screen.
• Please note: in this session, one Mac laptop will be needed per team, so if you have one, it would be useful to have it with you

Duration: 5.5 hours including lunch break

Gain insights on the opportunities and challenges of integrating computation into tools used in the creative process, and consider what tools might be in the designer’s toolbox in the future

In today’s digitally-mediated world, the shape of design and the role of designers in the creative process is very different to what it was even just ten years ago. As our design tools are beginning to understand more of our intuitive human knowledge, they have the ability to either automate our decisions away from us or become more intelligent collaborators in an enhanced creative process. How might our role as designers change in this computationally-mediated future and what tools will we need in our toolbox?

The opportunities and challenges of integrating increasingly advanced computing technologies into the creative process and suggestions for how we might develop these tools to be collaborators, and not just calculators, will be discussed in this workshop led by Pip Mothersill (MIT Media Lab). Participants will also take part in several hand-ons on exercises where they will consider the role of technology in the earlier, more tacit activities of the creative process and develop concepts for future design tools.

Workshop outline:

• Computing design: how can we break down the creative process in order to design tools for it?
• Desert Island Studio exercise and discussion: developing non-digital design tools
• Digitising and (de)humanising: how can we utilise the power of computing without eliminating the human from the process?
• Future Toolbox ideation and discussion: applying learning from the previous exercise and discussion to develop design tools for our more digitally-enabled future

Duration: 2.5 hours

This workshop discusses how a consumer’s needs and expectations of a product or service changes when they are interacting with them under different conditions. This phenomenon sends our consumers into different modes of behavior over months or even minutes, and is often overlooked as part of the more traditional persona development process.

We’ll examine the relationship and differences between our consumers’ core identity and the behaviors they exhibit, and learn how to model an understanding of their behavioral fluidity.

By understanding why and when our consumers exhibit different modes of behavior, we can design our products and services to flex to their needs in the right ways and at the right time.

This workshop includes an introductory talk followed by multiple rounds of group work where participants will apply these principles to product and service design methods.

Length: 2 hours

Keywords: Teams, systems-thinking, self-organizing, case, study, Change Management

Do you believe in self-organizing teams? Do your teams sometimes do better and sometimes worse? Do you know what causes it and what you can do about it?

This workshop presents a way to understand what makes your teams successful and tells what you can do about it. Workshop is meant to people who are building, growing or nurturing self-organizing teams in their organization.

We developed a method to study team success factors at Reaktor. Based on the findings we developed a format to make teams succeed more systematically. This workshop introduces our method of studying teams, our key findings, and the team success format we created to be systematically used at Reaktor.

Duration: 90 minutes