Let’s take a quick dive into Biological Anthropology, Archaeology, and a little Ethnography to discover how humans have been creating, surviving, and thriving by “sketching” through the centuries to today! Enjoy finding out why working that pencil is key to your humanity AND gain fun, easy, and actionable inspiration for your work!

I design Voice User Interfaces for telephony and multimodal applications. Sketching isn’t usually the first thing that comes to mind when designing for speech, but it actually reveals a lot of narrative and contextual details that can impact the design. In this activity session we’ll practice techniques for visualizing audio experiences, including sketching, storyboarding, and physical improvisation/bodystorming.

What is there to learn from other forms of drawing, technical and otherwise?

As a discipline, interface design is incredibly nascent, and many of the tools we use have lost their historical context, and the non-designy folks we work with are often at a loss for how to process our specifications because they have lost their “pictureness”.

What insights can we glean from drawings, technical and otherwise, from other disciplines and periods? Eg, da Vinci’s technical drawings, the works of ancient Egypt, Miro’s drawings, mechanical engineering drafts, etc.

Visual brainstorming. In this session we’ll use a series of fast sketching and rapid ideation exercises designed to open up our thinking. Think of these as cognitive calisthenics that you can do solo or with a group any time you need to generate ideas or solve a problem.

Sketching is a flexible, cheap, incredibly useful tool for generating, sharing, and getting feedback on ideas. But it can still be tough to get people to draw at work, especially in a conservative environment.

In this session, I’ll share the story how we brought sketchnoting to Marquette University and how it has helped us communicate with each other better. I’ll share some photos of sketchnotes from our weekly standup meetings and some tips on how to help your coworkers overcome their fear of sketching.

Then, we’ll talk together about how you might create a sketching culture at your workplace.

Can someone talk about (multi-touch) gestures:
* what are the “standard” gestures, do they have any (shorthand) notation, and what is their typical usage in designing a new UX
* what to consider before creating a custom gesture
* how to draw a gesture; how to mark one up

My apologies if this is the wrong way to suggest/request a topic.

This session will teach and demonstrate a simple exercise called 6-8-5s. This is an activity that can be used in any stage of the ideation process and is welcoming to designers and non-designers. The goal with 6-8-5s is to generate between 6-8 ideas (related to some meeting objective) in 5 minutes.

This session will be geared towards non-sketchers or non-designers AND to folks who work a lot with non-sketchers and non-designers. The goal is to learn a few simple techniques for sketching (think: sketching to communicate, not sketching to produce art); and then practice those techniques until you begin to feel more comfortable at it. All that’s required is pen & paper and a little willingness to draw!

Thanks,
Mike