Presented by:

August 16, 2013, 8:30-10:00am

Mad*Pow – 179 Lincoln St., Boston

UPDATE: Our August presenter is now Adam Connor of Mad*Pow.
Free tickets will be available Monday, August 12, starting at 7:00 AM.

Adam Connor is an Experience Design Director with Mad*Pow in Portsmouth, NH. Adam combines 10+ years of experience in interaction and experience design with a background in Computer Science, film, and illustration to create effective and easy-to-use digital products and services. He believes that no matter how utilitarian a tool is, at the core of its creation lies a story; uncovering that story is key to its success. Adam is also a strong proponent of critique, not only in design, but also as a key component of collaboration, learning, and improvement. Occasionally, he shares his perspectives on design at adamconnor.com anddiscussingdesign.com.

Discussing Design: The Art of Critique. Collaboration requires us to share our work; to communicate our ideas with one another and collect other’s thoughts in order to know whether the designs and creations we’re producing are meeting the objectives of our project. But often we wrestle with collecting and giving feedback. We get comments that are less then helpful because they seem irrelevant or unclear. We receive feedback at inopportune times rather than points in the process where they would have been useful in informing design decisions. Or we have trouble giving feedback because we’re afraid of hurting someone’s feelings or them getting to defensive.

This is where critique comes in. Our ability to critique speaks directly to the quality of the conversations we have with teammates, whether they be designers, developers, stakeholders or whomever. Designers frequently complain about the quality and uselessness of the feedback they are given, but we rarely take a step back and examine how to collect useful feedback and make our discussions around our designs more productive.

By taking the time to examine what critique is, how it relates to the feedback we need and how it operates in the creative process we can focus our conversations and improve our ability to collaborate.


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