Design at a service for research

Speaker: Agnieszka (Aga) Szóstek

Affiliation: HIT Lab NZ

Time: Friday 19/09/2014 from 13:00 to 14:00

Venue: Access Grid UWS. Presented from Parramatta (EB.1.32), accessible from Campbelltown (26.1.50) and Penrith (Y239).

Abstract: The traditional role of design and designer rapidly changes as new design disciplines such as Service or Experience Design come to life. The new approach to creating products and services requires designers not only to focus on delivering esthetically pleasing solutions but to become equal partners in the collaborative process of product and service design. In my presentation I would like to show how design skills could be applied to creating research tools that stimulate deep user engagement leading to collecting rich insights which in turn can be used to define innovative products and services.

Biography:

Dr Agnieszka (Aga) Szóstek is an adjunct at the Design Department of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in Poland and a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Informatics at Tallinn University in Estonia. She has a background from linguistics, Human-Computer Interaction and Industrial Design from Warsaw University, Poland and Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. Her research have been published in leading journals and conferences. Her interests lie in the fields of Social Communication, Experience Design and Service Design.

Next to her academic work, Aga helps various companies to develop user-centric approach to designing services, systems and products that aim to delight their customers by applying the Design Thinking approach. She combines the roles of a strategic adviser, mentor, researcher and designer into various projects from service and application design through design for internal communication to redesign of processes. She works with Polish and international companies such as: Play (telecom), Allegro (Polish TradeMe), Samsung R&D, Meble VOX (furniture producer), Paradyż (ceramics producer), PZU (insurance company), Orange Labs (telecom research), Netia (Internet provider), Raiffeisen, Millennium (banks) and a number of governmental institutions. Previously she worked at Philips Research, Google and Oce Technologies.