About Todd Wilkens

In this workshop you will:

• Learn techniques for gaining consensus and clarity in business and strategy decisions
• Gain methods to help users talk about the intangible and abstract aspects of their experiences
• Acquire techniques to help people converse quickly and effectively about design concepts

More often than not, good ideas remain trapped in people’s heads or get written up, but then languish as reports on hard drives and bookshelves. At best, these ideas live in PowerPoint? files, where they’re treated like descriptions for a toy in a sealed box: everyone reads the packaging and dreams up their own ideas for the product experience inside. As we all know, few things are more abstract than ideas about experiences.

The sad truth is that most of the time, we don’t stop to give form to that great idea in our heads, so we never get to see its true strengths and benefits, or faults and shortcomings. In this workshop, you’ll explore ways to give form to those ideas and clarify how their value can be communicated, evaluated and improved. Todd Wilkens, a Design Researcher at Adaptive Path, will share techniques for getting these ideas out of your head and into tangible forms on walls, tables, posterboard and other mediums, not only making it easier to share your ideas with others, but leading you to better design solutions. You will focus specifically on how to improve strategy, research and design.

This workshop is for anyone working to get great products and services out into the world. So if you’re a business analyst, strategist, researcher, designer, or anyone working to create products and services, please join us.