Oct 07 2007
Heading East again to China’s design epicenter
This November, I will head eastwards again to Beijing for UPA China’s annual design and user experience conference - User Friendly 2007. This time around I will be conducting a workshop on how design teams in Asia can shift from the traditional ‘outsourcing’ and ‘captive unit’ mindset towards one geared for product innovation and in-house product incubation. This year’s conference promises to be even more exciting than last time - with specific sessions around the usability of public services in China, housing in Beijing for the Olympics, and the burgeoning consumer products and services sector in China.
My motivation behind conducting this workshop (other than my own experience of these challenges in the past few years) specifically in China was to involve the international and Chinese participants at this workshop and generate some collective knowledge on how those of us in ‘emerging economies’ (India, China, Brazil and the like) are coping with the challenge of cultivating innovative thinking in virtual distributed teams and find out what sorts of best practices (or worst practices) people are following. I will plan on covering (among other areas) the state of the outsourced product industry, the challenges it poses for virtual and outsourced design and UX teams, the innovation opportunity, people topics (how to hire and hold on to scarce talent, how to build partnerships and local ecosystems), process topics (how to innovate in distributed workspaces, how to deal with ambiguity), and product topics (how to apply the user centered design process in the real world without blind allegiance).
If you are planning to attend my workshop or know of interesting design and innovation thinking workshops (or have attended interesting ones), feel free to drop in a note - would love to get any feedback as i prepare my workshop materials.
