Thursday, November 17th at 5:30 pm PDT

Portland Design Thinkers is excited to announce our next event with Herman D'Hooge: What Do Prototypes Prototype?

There is a saying at IDEO: “If a picture is worth a 1,000 words, a prototype is worth 10,000 meetings.”

Prototyping is an inseparable element of Design Thinking; both as a mindset and as practice. It’s the Design Doing sibling of Design Thinking. While it’s impossible to overstate the power and importance of prototyping throughout the design process, it remains one of the most underutilized, misunderstood, and often misused parts of the process.

This talk explores a range of prototyping-related topics: What do prototypes really prototype?, Who are they for and how should they be used? What kinds of prototypes are most useful at what stages in the design & development process or throughout the customer journey? Practical tips on how to embed prototyping into your team’s or organization’s everyday way of working.

“The road to product success is paved with prototypes.”

BIO
Herman D’Hooge is a Management Consultant and Adjunct Professor with the Collaborative Design MFA & Design Systems MA at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) where currently teaches Futures-Centered Design, Strategy & Foresight, and advises final-year students on their thesis projects. He retired from a 35-year career at Intel where he worked in computer hardware & software product development, technology research, industry evangelism, branded consumer products, new business incubation, strategic innovation, organizational transformation, academic relations, social impact initiatives, and diversity & inclusion initiatives. He pioneered the use of human-centered design approaches in the high-tech development process and spread its adoption throughout the organization. Over the years, he has gained a reputation as a non-linear thinker, multi-disciplinarian, dot connector, pioneer, and change agent unafraid to challenge the status quo. His consulting interests are mainly in the areas of creativity, human-centered innovation, adaptive leadership, psychological safety, and trust. He holds an MS in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Computer Science both from the University of Ghent, Belgium.

#design #pdt #prototype #uxdesign #designthinking

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Watch the Video of the Event

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. 

Thur Sept at 5:30PM Pacific, join Portland Design Thinkers for an Evening of Q & A with Kristina Halvorson!

Bring your questions about Content Strategy, Information Architecture, UX Writing, and more for a fun evening with great company and conversation!

About our Speaker:
Kristina Halvorson is widely recognized as one of the most important voices in content strategy. Her seminal book Content Strategy for the Web is credited with sparking the recognition of content strategy as a critical field of practice. Kristina is the CEO and founder of Brain Traffic, a content strategy services firm. She is also the executive producer of the Confab and Button conferences, and the host of The Content Strategy Podcast. Kristina lives in St. Paul, Minnesota with two amazing teenagers and a very good dog.

Watch Video

THU, Aug 25 · 4:30 PM PDT

PDT is thrilled to announce our first in-person event since 2020!

Join us for lively conversation, networking, and real, live, face-to-face time with your fellow Design Thinkers!

Food and beverage provided. Please RSVP and also let us know if your plans change, so we can plan accordingly.

Extra special thanks to Fresh Consulting, Concrete, and Curiate for making this event possible!

THURSDAY, July 21 · 6:30 PM PDT

After a sudden wrenching change to remote-only research and 2 years of sanding down the painful burrs, we've all learned a few things. It's time to think again about where in-person research is superior but also where our research practice should lean permanently to the remote side of the boat after the pandemic is over.

Watch Recording

THURSDAY, June 30 · 5:30 PM PDT

Share your experiences, learn something new, and connect with others in the Portland Design Thinkers Community!

Join your choice of virtual breakout rooms and spend time with fellow PDTers on a special topic of interest.

THURSDAY, June 9 · 5:30 PM PDT

Accessibility basics to help designers better understand accessibility as a person-first design opportunity versus a compliance task at the end of a product build. The goal of this talk is to empower others to feel more confident in creating a better accessible product, to be able to better think through all user needs, as well as where and how to change existing design practices without the intimidation of complex language and guidelines.

Watch Recording

THURSDAY, May 19 · 6:00 PM PDT

…or how to make Comic Books for the US Army
We will explore how to use applied futures methodologies to not only envision a range
of possible and potential futures but how to turn these into actionable tools to change
the future...like comic books!

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THU, APR 28 · 5:30 PM PDT

Design Thinking and Futures methods have increasingly aligned. How can you leverage proven foresight practices to inspire present-day design for future people, communities, and ecologies?

Watch Recording

THU, JUL 15 · 10 AM PDT

Cheska Teresa, Chief Growth Officer for Butter, wIll talk to us about their mission to empower facilitators to host even better online workshops than in the physical world, and how the COVID pandemic jump-started their plans. We’ll have a chance to play around with Butter — and even more, provide some feedback on cool new concepts that Butter has in development!