Johannesburg 2017

Welcome (‘IA Today’ with Jason Hobbs)

Thandi Guilherme (Freethinking - Gold Sponsor speaker)

"The rigidity of Agile and how design can help"

With Agile (and Lean) being the flavour of the day, I want to share some experience of the way it actually plays out at enterpriselevel. Spoiler alert: not great. I also want to propose ways to (ironically) be more agile about Agile. 

Presented by Nicholas Hobson (Accenture Interactive)

Presented by Terence Fenn (University of Johannesburg)

In this talk I will be introducing and briefly discussing some of the key philosophical concepts that underpin experience and experience design. Concepts that will be addressed include embodied cognition, activity theory and Miss World 1994, Aishwarya Rai.

 Presented by Helga Stegmann (Mantaray)

With mobile devices in South Africa becoming cheaper and much more readily available each year, more users are migrating from their feature phones and adopting smartphones to get things done. A study conducted by Mantaray to understand how the switch from feature phone to smartphone is affecting users, has delivered important findings on smartphone usage, setup costs, changes in user behaviour and the influence of learnt behaviour on users' perceptions of data. This presentation/talk will dive in deeper highlighting the importance of AI, speak about the research findings and how we use the them for strategies.

Presented by Lindi Maritz and Rob Turner (Greenside Design Centre)

1.30 - 2.00 Dean Broadley (Barclays Africa Group)

Rapid prototyping for insights into customer experiences

Presented by Ayomide Onasanya (Acumen Media)

I will be talking about how IA can be used to drive innovation in product development, and how successful companies, big/small, have harnessed the power of IA to produce addictive products. 

Presented by Angus Campbell (University of Johannesburg)

Professional designers often disregard users’ design agency. Negating the power of “lay designers” thus, is arguably at the cost of the relevance of a final design for its intended users. This is nowhere more evident than in so-called “developing” contexts where people have always been driven to design and innovate due to inequality, poverty, and unmet needs. Utilising the framework of activity theory, I will explore exceptional examples of grassroots innovation in South Africa. The aim of this is to encourage expert designers to shift their gaze and align their skills to amplify the efforts of lay designers in order to result in more sustainable and appropriate change.

Presented by Yael Gold (University of Johannesburg)

I will be presenting on the process of my topic and how I have used methods such as IA and HCD to create a strategic solution of the presented problem within the hospital environment I was conducting my research in.

Presented by Raeesah Karriem (Greenside Design Centre)

Presented by Stuart Windram (University of Johannesburg)

My presentation focuses on some of the theories and preliminary findings from my MTech research project entitled The User-Centred Development of Design-It-Yourself Kits: Improving Grade 7-9 Technology Education in Government Schools in Johannesburg. A main theme throughout is the significance of Technology Education in our techno-centric lives.

Presented by Guidione Machava (MozDevs)

Mozambique is a new country when we talk about access to information digital media. With about 26 million inhabitants, less than 10% have access to the internet. Much of what we have online today follows the standard patterns of information architecture flow, in most cases there is no consonance with the purpose of the project, but it has not always been so. In my presentation I will talk about the past, the present and about how UX activists like me are planning to shape the future of Information Architecture in Mozambique.

Presented by Taurai Mtake (Greenside Design Center)

This project is situated within the field of decolonial discourse surrounding the development of Afrikan writing systems within the diverse cultures of contemporary Southern Afrikan society. As a graphic designer, I am concerned with how the tradition of graphic symbolism, sometimes called the Bantu writing symbols of Southern Afrika, has become a staged authenticity instead of a real cultural practice. In the commercialising of local material culture on foreign terms, the history of meaning of the objects is often lost, sometimes even to the producers themselves. It is in this way that a spiritually important indigenous system of written communication can be transfigured in contemporary society merely as an element of decorative art or a curio for mass consumption. I believe Afrikans ought to question this shift.

The book aims to inspire ways in which such systems can be maintained and utilised in our contemporary society as a form of visual communication and as a manner of storytelling for both the younger and older generations.The boardgames shown here are based on two classical indigenous games: tsoro, which is a mathematical strategy game, and diketo, which is a game of hand-eye coordination. 

The complete board game package comes in three parts: play, learn and tell a story. The playing part consists of two games that are printed on a sitting mat where children can sit and play their games. After playing, the next part of the game teaches about the symbols and their meanings. After learning the meanings of these symbols, a second function is added to the game tokens: they act as stamps that can print the symbols on paper. Children tell a story through stamping in a book or poster that can be shared with friends or the parents take a photo of their child’s story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14q6D7ZjoCA 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3UYTv83jrE&t=8s

Hosted by the Greenside Design Centre

At Rim & Rubber on Gleneagles Drive, Greenside