Tag: Girl Geek Dinners

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Fluxible meetups start next week

The last few months have been busy ones of me. There have been a few side projects keeping me busy but that aren’t quite ready for the public eye.

And there is also, of course, Fluxible coming back for the fifth year. For 2016 we expanded our thinking to create a deeper and richer experience, and evolved into Canada’s UX Festival.

All the planning and work will pay off starting one week from today, with the first of our Fluxible Meetups. There’s a full week of these events happening, and it’s an exciting range of topics and formats. Best of all, most of these events are free! You should really check out the entire schedule, but here are some highlights.

On each day Monday through Friday we have a Brown Bag Lunch event at the Communitech Hub. These events cover hiring for UX, product management and UX, longitudinal user research, and a systems design approach to UX. My personal favourite, though, might be my friend David Jensenius talking about art and technology and UX in the arts. I love that diversity! For anyone who works nearby, it’s pretty easy to grab your lunch and walk on over for one of these sessions.

This year we have some fine site visits to Waterloo Region companies that are doing some great product work: D2L, TD, Shopify Plus, and MUSIC will all be opening up there spaces to share the ways that they work and look and some cool products that their teams have created. And all of them are definitely excited about hosting and event and sharing their work with the community.

We’ve partnered up with several organizations in Waterloo Region this year. Hacking Health Waterloo, Girl Geek Dinners Waterloo Region, Design Chats, UX Book Club KW, and Communitech all have their own UX-themed events happening. I’m thrilled that these organizations are on board this year, and love what they’re doing to build community!

Finally, we’ve decided to present a concert this year. Why? Well, music has been an integral part of Fluxible from the very first edition. We’ve featured a stylistically diverse range of performances as a part of each year’s conference. It felt natural to try a concert, just for fun. To that end, we’re presenting Stealth in a concert at the Communitech Hub on Thursday.

And all these events are just one stream of Fluxible 2016!

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It’s Fluxible Week!

Logo: Fluxible - A User Experience Event

Well, all the preparations, machinations, and invocations have come together and Fluxible is upon us!

This year we’ve pulled together a whole week of events for Fluxible, and there are UX-related events happening on each of the next seven days, all of them featuring interesting and engaging material presented and shared by folks who are committed to building UX community in Waterloo Region and around the world. I’m looking forward to learning something from all of them.

Things get started today at Boltmade, where my colleagues Brian Potstra and Katie Cerar will be presenting a workshop on learning Sketch, a favourite design tool amongst the UX team there. This workshop filled up quickly, as the Boltmade Sessions events tend to do.

Tuesday sees the September edition of uxWaterloo taking place at Christie, where Alan Woo and Chris Kirby from their design team will be taking us on a deep dive into designing a remote control for one of their projectors. Registration for this session filled up by the end of August. Amazing…

Wednesday features UX Book Club Waterloo Region, and a visit from Abby Covert, who happens to be in town for Fluxible. Abby is smart and articulate — not to mention funny — and this session should make for an engaging conversation. Katie Cerar and Davis Neable have been presenting these UX Book Club events for quite a while now, and they know how to deliver a fine experience.

Thursday finds Christina Wodtke joining Girl Geek Dinners Waterloo Region to talk about “The Architecture of Advocacy”. Christina will be busy while she’s in town, as she’s also presenting a Fluxible workshop on Friday morning (see below) as well as a presentation during the Fluxible main program on Saturday (also see below!).

Friday is filled with pre-conference Fluxible workshops by Christina Wodtke (Design Thinking for Innovation), Stephen Anderson (Design for Understanding), and Jeff Gothelf & Jim Kalbach (Jazz Performance as a Model for Team Collaboration). There’s a lot of learning to be done!

Saturday and Sunday sees all the UX activity comes to a head with the main program for Fluxible. This year’s edition of the UX party disguised as a conference sold out faster than ever, and the speakers will deliver a rich collection of presentations.

Next week I’ll be sleeping it off…

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September kicks off a new season for uxWaterloo

After July and August sessions that featured relaxed conversations over drinks on summer patios, we’re kicking off a fresh new season of uxWaterloo events on Tuesday September 22 with a visit to Christie in Kitchener.

Their design team will be taking us deep into the process of creating a new remote control for their projectors. It’s always a great learning experience to see and hear how a design to team has approached and solved a problem, and the folks at Christie promise to share plenty of insights. It will be a terrific session. I’d usually encourage folks to register at this point, but the event is already full! Be sure to watch for announcements for more great uxWaterloo sessions for the fall.

There’s something special about the September session, though. It’s part of a full week of UX events in Waterloo Region that our Fluxible team has pulled together around this year’s edition of the UX conference disguised as a party.

In addition to the Tuesday uxWaterloo event, there’s a Boltmade Session on learning Sketch (Monday September 21); a UX Book Club meetup with Fluxible speaker Abby Covert (Wednesday September 23); and a Girl Geek Dinners Waterloo Region event with Fluxible speaker Christina Wodtke (Thursday September 24).

Of course, there’s a day filled with Fluxible pre-conference workshops on Friday September 25, and the week culminates in the main Fluxible program on Saturday September 26 and Sunday September 27!

Great stuff, right?