Oh the humanity
When tooling around with all the technological toys, tricks and trinkets at our command there is a constant danger of losing sight of the common core of the matter – the humans in the mix. However in this case I’m not talking about users. I’m talking about you – the designers, developers, product managers and well, yes… ok the users as well. Can’t forget them now can we. Can we?
My basic premise is that it doesn’t matter what process you use or what flavour you are. What matters is the people you have and how they play together.
With the growing popularity of agile we are starting to see a return to carbon based lifeforms as the center of processes and therein lies both a challenge and an opportunity. As user experience professionals the opportunity is all the humans we get to play with, the challenge is… well, all the humans we have to play with.
This talk seeks to flesh out the messy bits between the sensible steps in your process where the marvellously illogical, unpredictable humans come out to play.
I’ll draw from my background in group devised theatre and improvisation to reflect not on what you make, but how you play with others while you’re making it.
To make my points I’ll shamelessly hack elements from:
- Improvisation theory
- Group devised theatre
- Musical collaboration
- Suspension of disbelief
- Solo vs group performance
Pack warnings:
- There will be no slides
- I may ramble slightly
- For the shy amongst you, don’t be afraid. There will only be a minimum of audience participation involved (probably).
- You’ll possibly feel the urge to laugh at least a bit (and that’s ok)
