Event for "World Usability Day" 2016
Design sprint
World Usability Day is single day of events occurring around the world that brings together communities of professional, industrial, educational, citizen, and government groups for our common objective: to ensure that the services and products important to life are easier to access and simpler to use.
World Usability Day is an annual event that celebrates User Experience Design and takes place in different cities, all over the world. Since no event was planned in San Francisco I decided, together with my friend and fellow UXer Claudia Landivar-Cody that we should host our own event. It would be a chance for us to challenge ourselves, expand our horizon and give back to the generous UX community we've taken part in for the last year.
Since having participated in numerous designers events like networking, lectures, panel discussions, hackatons etc. I could look back into the ones that I thought had been the most rewarding and fun for me and my fellow participants. While doing that I realized that best functions were the ones where I got to listen, learn and do something practical. Therefore we decided to create a design sprint so people could learn something and practicing UX Design.
The theme of 2016 WUD was Sustainability.
Sustainability is a broad topic and since we knew that we were going to host an evening event we had to narrow the scope. An organization that has specialized in planning and executing sustainability goals is the United Nations. In September 2015, as part of a new sustainable development agenda, countries adopted a set of goals to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all. Each goal has specific targets to be achieved over the next 15 years. They are the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals.
For our event we chose to work with ONE specific UN goal to keep confining the objective further. So we took the second sustainability goal - End Hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture. In connection to the End Hunger goal we asked our audience:
We used an adjusted design sprint method, to fit within the short time frame we had, but also help our attendants solve a design problem.
The biggest take-aways of arranging a design event was the reactions from and interactions with our audience. It was wonderful to be able to inspire and help people, interact, create and solve problems together that was focused on creating a better world.
