UXDX Community:Embark on an excellent adventure: From Literalism to emotion in design and discovering your Ikigai

Welcome address from our UXDX ambassador

Emotions consume 80% of our lives, while the other 20% is intellect (Lough, 2006). Yet when it comes to service design, it still feels uncomfortable talking about emotions in particular in government. With this statistic in mind, can we really afford to ignore emotions when designing services?

This talk covers the what, the why, and the how of designing for emotions, sharing tools and techniques to help move conversations from dark art to serious strategy.

In this talk, Kerrie combines theoretical models, real-life case studies, and practical techniques to help participants curate their own toolkit to embed emotions in their agile practice.

Conceptual and abstract design is great, but sometimes, for users to get their jobs done in the most efficient way, why reinvent the wheel?
In this talk, Ryan explores the roots of common UI patterns, and their physical origins, and how this has helped him in his design journey, being neurodivergent. He then expands this into marketing strategies, product design and a real example of his award winning Service Design of the UK’s first paperless mortgage experience.
We begin by explaining the concept of literalism with real examples like car dashboards, UI components like accordions & carousels, and iconography like floppy disks!
Taking it up a level, Ryan talks about product-level literalism, and how companies/products like Lyft, Google Sheets and FaceTime have embraced it to their advantage for adoption and showcase 2 real case studies:

1. Jones Knowles Ritchie’s work with Dominoes pizza to redesign the product of packaging, using user research to inform the design using literalism.
2. Ryan's own, award-winning, design whilst at NatWest, of the UK’s first paperless mortgage experience.
   Finally, we close with some future concepts, on how we can reverse modern technology, to embrace literalism, to bring back nostalgic dopamine from days of old.

Unlock the transformative potential of bringing Ikigai into your work by aligning individual passions and skills with organizational goals to foster a sense of purpose and fulfillment. “Ikigai” is a Japanese concept made of two words 'Iki' meaning alive and 'gai' meaning value or worth, literally meaning – what's the value or worth in being alive!
This concept can be brought to work, wherein we blend passion and purpose together to find fulfilment and boost business value. The four pillars of Ikigai are finding what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for, and form the cornerstone of this transformative approach.
In this session, you will learn how to apply this at work by:

• identifying areas of passion of both customers and employees
• finding the mission of the product and innovation opportunities
• defining goals and influencing at work while collaborating as a team
• create positive results in employee satisfaction, product development and strategy.