About TEDxUofW
TEDxUofW is an independently organized TED conference at the University of Washington following the theme of The Next Generation. The focus of this conference is to bring together forward-thinking students and pioneering leaders for an empowering dialogue on the future of business, culture and technology. By talking about tomorrow today, we want to create agents of change.

More information: http://www.tedxuofw.com/

Cost To Attend:
*Students: $35
General Public: $50

Date: April 21st 1:00-6:00PM (Reception 6:00-8:00PM)
Location: UW Tower

Timeline:
APPLICATION DEADLINE: March 23rd
Invitations Sent Out: March 27th
RSVP Deadline (for those invited): April 5th
**Waitlist Invitations: April 6th
**Waitlist RSVP: April 9th Continue reading →

Please join the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) in Winter Quarter for a 10-week seminar on current topics in the HCDE field by industry experts. Each 40-minute talk will be followed by a Q&A session. Members of the UW community and the public are welcome. More information about the series is available online at hcde.uw.edu/521.

Title: Fast Iteration Prototyping Study
Date: March 16, 2012
Speaker: Paula Bach

When: Fridays, 12:30-1:20 PM
Where: Loew Hall, Room 206, UW Seattle campus

The fast iteration prototyping study methodology addresses three issues: testing early and often, iterating as much as possible, and getting stakeholders involved. The method is for use early in the development cycle so that teams can explore multiple prototypes in parallel and choose the right design with which to move forward. Several features in Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE were subjected to this method in 2010 and 2011. The talk will explore the rationale for the method, some details about the process, and a case study of a feature in Visual Studio. The case study shows how the method helped choose the right way forward and how rapid iteration resulted in many changes and refinements. The feature improvements will be released in the next version of Visual Studio coming out in Spring 2012. Continue reading →

Join the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) as our undergraduate students present their final design projects from Visual Communication (HCDE 411), instructed by Jacob Fleisher!

Students have been learning and applying the building blocks of visual design in order to communicate messages and information with intent. Following the requirements that their final projects’ designs be useful, usable and desirable, eight groups of students will show a specific scenario in a product design of their own. The groups will present a specific use case, or scenario, that best demonstrates real user value, visible and visual differentiation, and superiority over the competition.

There will be four presentations per session. Each session will have invited outside professionals providing review and critique. Come join us!

When: Thursday, March 8, 11:30 AM–1:20 PM; Wednesday, March 14, 4:30–6:20 PM
Where: Thomson Hall, Room 101, UW Seattle campus

The presentations are open to the public.

Please join the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) in Winter Quarter for a 10-week seminar on current topics in the HCDE field by industry experts. Each 40-minute talk will be followed by a Q&A session. Members of the UW community and the public are welcome. More information about the series is available online at hcde.uw.edu/521.

Title: Contestational Design: Sociotechnical innovation by social movements and advocacy organizations
Date: March 9, 2012
Speaker: Tad Hirsch

When: Fridays, 12:30-1:20 PM
Where: Loew Hall, Room 206, UW Seattle campus

Recent events like the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement have again placed relationships between technology and collective action at the forefront of contemporary discourse. Although timely, the recognition that activists are early and innovative users of communications technology is not new. Social movements and advocacy organizations have long been recognized as hotbeds of innovation. The social movement scholar Alberto Melucci famously called them “laboratories” where participants experiment with social organization, representation, and democratic processes.

Less well-understood are the means through with this innovation comes about. The popular press tends to assume a sort of technological determinism in which “heroic” technologies give rise to new forms of collective action (for example, “The Twitter Revolution”). Conversely, social movement scholarship often describes a process of “appropriation” in which activists creatively repurpose technologies developed by the commercial sector for explicitly social ends.

In this talk, I present a third perspective in which social movements and advocacy organizations participate in sociotechnical innovation involving the simultaneous design of tactics, technologies, and organizational form. Drawing on over a decade’s experience working with social movements and advocacy organizations, I will describe activists as engaging in contestational design, which I describe as a unique form of design practice that responds to the particular context in which activism occurs, and is informed by an explicit recognition of the values and ideological commitments that underpin most advocacy work.

Through several case studies, I will describe the principles and activities that shape contestational design practice, and will discuss relationships between contestational design and commercial design. Finally, I will suggest ways that a contestational design perspective challenges and informs mainstream design practice.
Continue reading →