Super Meetup 2020 (in the time of COVID-19)
Hello, friends, we made it to April! It’s hard to believe what happened in the month of March. The local design community, ourselves included, came together for one of the first big events of the year, the Super Meetup, and a talk by Jared Spool.
The event took place a few days after the Seattle area lost our first resident to the COVID-19, and portended a month-long siege where residents self-isolated in the hope of saving our most vulnerable citizens and “flattening the curve” of COVID-19.
Needless to say, attendance at the Super Meetup was down from previous years. Little did we know it would be one of the last in-person events to occur for the foreseeable future. About 150 folks were in attendance, bumping elbows and waving hello in place of the usual handshakes and hugs.
Photo credit: Roxanne Kenison (@roxken)
Many local design organizations were in attendance, coming together for the Super Meetup. At IxDA Seattle’s info booth, we invited attendees to participate in a creative brainstorming around our groups 2020 theme, growth. People contributed their thoughts on the topic of learning: both what we’ve learned recently, and what we want to learn moving forward.
For the main event, Jared Spool took to the stage to talk about one of his favorite topics: designing as a team.
Spool started with a few design parables to get us thinking about what is good design, that which takes into account the context in which the problem is situated, and a solution that encompasses the entire experience.
Spool also talked about the design process, and inclusively designing with a heterogenous team. He posed some questions. Who’s on that team? Product? How inclusive do we get? How are they adding value? Are they getting the support they need to contribute that value? How do we convey the process itself?
“If we create the design process, these are the questions we have to tackle. We need to make sure that everybody who needs to be in the room is there, and that all people are contributing, not just those who think they are designers.”
How do we get all those people to start producing good design? Spool asked.
From Jared Spool’s ‘Design is a Team Sport’ presentation
“Learn practices, how to sketch, how to practice, if we follow what we learn, we become consciously competent.”
So to produce good design as a team, we bring everyone into the process. Sitting in on interviews, conducting daily design stand-ups. Just by being involved, everyone raises the bar to “conscious competence”.
Thus, you have design teamwork!
Listen here for Spool’s full talk.