About David & Mary Sherwin
David and Mary Sherwin are co-founders of Ask The Sherwins, LLC, a consulting and training firm that helps design organizations develop the capabilities they need for better product design and cross-functional teamwork. They have recently coached product and service design teams and advised on innovation training practices for organizations such as Philips Oral Healthcare, Tipping Point Community, MetaLab Design, and Designlab. They are on the visiting faculty at Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, and David is a Fellow at frog, a global product strategy and design firm. In their spare time, David and Mary have been able to collaborate on three books, including the the design bestseller Creative Workshop, and give presentations and workshops all over the world. Their forthcoming book Turning People Into Teams: Habits, Rituals, and Routines That Redesign How We Work will be available in October 2018 from Berrett-Koehler.
Futurecasting for Product Design
Getting a team together to talk about "the future" of your product can be exhilarating...or utterly tedious. How do you keep the process on track? On the one hand, the work must be actionable, pragmatic even. On the other, it's the future: how do you capture that ineffable wonder for what could be?
Futurecasting is a structured approach to explore what products may be required in the far future, based on emergent trends. Far from being idle speculation, futurecasting is a discipline that begins in research before making the long journey into story and transformative worldbuilding. In this hands-on UX design workshop, you'll work in small teams to develop product ideas for the far future, and explore how using different brainstorming and storytelling methods can elevate what is often a purely strategic exercise into new creative territory.
If you've ever considered designing for more than 3 years out on a product, working with a team that thinks about the far future, or you've ever idly wondered about how to design for the future, then this workshop is for you.
Goals:
Understand how futurecasting can help UX designers gain visibility into disruptive trends and identify new areas of opportunity
Learn how research informs and influences the ways that cross-functional teams think about the future, beyond trends analysis and forecasting.
Practice the use of tools such as signal projection and storytelling within a futurecasting context in order to better develop and illuminate UX scenarios