Past OPEN Lectures

The City of Experiences is an ongoing project led by Department of Unusual Certainties that, through different experiments and engagements, continues to question how cities are constructed and who they are constructed for. If we modify the definition of cities to encompass the experiences of the invisible cities that extend beyond physical infrastructure, the city can become a space of greater potential to support and facilitate new people-to-people and people-to-object interactions.

The aim of this interactive lecture is to explore the proposal of city building through experience design, imagining the experiences of the city first and then building the physical and digital city up from those experiences, allowing us to speculate in new futures and alternate storylines of the past and using them as a driving force for design. The discussion will also touch on the true cost of products and whether our perception of sustainability accurately includes all dimensions of the impact.

Department of  Unusual Certainties (DoUC) is a multi-disciplinary studio who design collaborative processes for engagement, communication and education. In 2010, DoUC’s started as a result of a shared need to ask questions about our everyday existence. This curiosity continues to grow and has manifested over the years through projects that traverse urban design, public art, education, cartography and social engagement. Sometimes strange, beautiful or controversial, douc starts each project with a dedication to creating substantive experiences and content that people can engage with, reflect on and react to.

You’re designing a new service, product, app, website, etc., and you want all the parts to work together. You want it to make sense; to be seamless. You want it to be *meaningful*. But where do coherence and meaning come from? In our experience, it’s narrative: the most meaningful experiences have the strongest stories, and a clear narrative arc makes for good strategy.

This talk discusses the psychology of storytelling and why humans tend to think in narrative. More importantly, it presents a concrete approach for turning written and visual narrative into a robust UX planning and prototyping tool, that enables rapid conceptual iteration early in a project (rather than burning hours on premature Agile sprints). Drawing on numerous real-world examples, this talk demonstrates Narrative Prototyping can inform user journeys, scenarios and service maps, and get design teams communicating and working in the same direction.

Victoria Kirk-Owal and Carl Alviani are design strategists and writers who’ve been tackling this problem for over a decade, and have found that the most meaningful experiences usually have the best stories–and that a good story always makes for better strategy.

When: Mon. April 8th 2019, 17-18.