This Friday at Pivotal Labs Boulder, we’re hosting an evening of food, drink and discussion, to bring some of our learnings around Lean User Experience to the larger design community, and in particular to attendees of the annual international IxDA conference.
We, in this case, is a group of smart folks I’ve had the privilege to work with over the past year, a working group called the Balanced Team. This particular event is the result of the hard work of people at Cooper, Hot Studio, LUXr, SideReel and Atomic Object.
For the past year, we’ve been sharing ideas and discussing new ways to approach design and product development, to create better products, make happier customers, and reduce waste. We’ve been doing this while creating better integrated, more collaborative, more responsive teams. In that time, a number of us have been getting together on a regular basis to really sit down and discuss what works and what doesn’t, and to try to distill these ideas into principles and techniques that are repeatable and practical.
We’ve been itching to engage with the larger design community to start to break down the culture of Big Upfront Design, the Cult of the Rockstar Designer, and the culture of necessary infallability; to fight the blind application of Waterfall and to disrupt the antipatterns we’ve found so antithetical to effective collaboration with agile development teams; to encourage patterns that allow designers to embrace early customer feedback, and to test hypotheses quickly; and most importantly, to foster a deeper collaboration with the very folks who have the biggest impact on what we build. We’ve seen over and over that, when done correctly, a light-weight process gives designers more control, not less.
It’s out of this series of discussions that I first arrived at a framing of the problem space that I talk about in Enough Design, and it’s also through these sessions that we’ve found a growing community of designers, product people, enterprises and other developers who are working to develop better techniques for integrated product development. We’ve found the conversation immensely valuable in our practice, and we hope to learn and share with more of you.
If you’re a designer in Boulder for IxDA, or just someone who cares about usable techniques for bringing Lean principles into the development of compelling User Experience, come join us on Friday for deLUX. This is a free event, but space is limited, so please RSVP through http://pivotallabs.com/landing/deLUX.
