How can creatives persuade people to consume more sustainably? How can design support the transition to renewable energy sources? How can design help in achieving the United Nations sustainable development goals?

In other words, how do we design a future we want? That’s the question we are asking ourselves in this year’s World Usability Event. As in previous editions, we will be looking for insights, ideas and guides we can translate into our daily practice as designers.

We have invited speakers who will share their experience of putting the SDGs in the centre of their work and how it affects their practices.

This year’s event will take place at HvA Leeuwenburg, starting at 18:00. Our host, the Master Digital Design, will welcome us with drinks and snacks before we will be inspired by our speakers.

TALKS

Resilient Urban Application by Indranil Bhattacharya

Policy makers, businesses, and citizens in cities face challenges like rapid urbanization and climate change, and there is an urgent need for digital applications that are sensitive to these changes. From mobility to food logistics, and from healthcare to urban planning, digital solutions require adaptive and progressive growth with a city’s changing needs. Moving beyond greenfield agility and opaque monetization agendas in black-box systems, digital urban applications are required that can progressively withstand complex urban challenges with resilience.

Speculative design by Theo Ploeg

The future is uncertain. Recent environmental, societal and technological developments give us a hard time understanding the changes our world goes through. A focus on products, services, and customers isn’t enough anymore. We have to invest in more meaningful relationships with the world around. The Sustainable Developments Goals (SDGs) give us a framework for that. But how do we integrate them in our practice?

Speculative design, mapping the future in a meaningful way, might be a solution. Instead of focussing on problems in the present in imagines how developments change over time and affect the near future. By building both a possible and preferable future, it opens up ways of thinking about our practice beyond the present and opens up opportunities to effect longer-term change.

Service Design for social innovation in vulnerable contexts by Valentina Salvi

Valentina is using Service Design for social innovation in vulnerable contexts. She recently visited Uganda on behalf of the charity ‘Plan International’ to understand how as a charity, they can support marginalised girls in rural areas of Uganda to secure sustainable employment / entrepreneurship, whilst at the same time positively impacting the environment.

18:00 Welcome to guests

18:30 Food and drinks

19:30 Opening

19:45 Resilient Urban Application by Indranil Bhattacharya

20:15 Service Design for social innovation in vulnerable contexts by Valentina Salvi

20:45 Break with drinks

21:00 Speculative design by Theo Ploeg

21:30 Q&A with speakers

21:45 Drinks and snacks

22:30 End