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Join Portland Design Thinkers for an evening with Leo Frishberg: Cracks in the workplace-COVID, Design Thinking, and the Future of Work.

COVID & the global pandemic’s impact on working norms continue to raise questions about the nature of work Y the “new normal.”

How much time should employees be “in the office?” What is the impact of a fully remote workforce on an organization’s productivity, innovation & culture? By shifting work to our homes, how do organizations address employee safety, equity, access & privilege?

These are just some of the questions Athena Health (the 2nd largest electronic health records company in the US) raised in its “Future of Work” strategic initiative.
In this talk, Leo offers a case study of Athena’s design thinking and experimental approach to addressing these (and other) questions. Not limiting its lens to technological fixes, the Athena Workplace Experience (athenaWE) taskforce embraced architecture, DEI, & cultural values, in addition to technology, to explore the future of work landscape of opportunity. Leo will share unsettling, surprising, & unconventional insights gleaned from the athenaWE taskforce’s work that likely have universal appeal.

About our speaker:

• Leo Frishberg is the Director of User Experience at Athena Health. Leo is an active member of the User Experience community both locally & internationally. For over 20 years, he has served on the board of the Computer Human Interaction Forum of Oregon (CHIFOO, pronounced KI-foo), Portland, SW Washington’s local chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery’s special interest group for UX, and currently leads the North American .chapter of Design at Business, a global non-profit dedicated to applying design thinking and innovation to address existential threats to humanity. He is also the writer of Presumptive Design with Charles Lambdin.