On Tuesday, I had the pleasure of presenting at the June meeting of BayCHI. It was a really fun evening, where the audience was participatory and engaged. It’s such fun to share ideas with a group of people that are smart and insightful…the questions that people asked were terrific and right on target for the material.

The evening was a full one. I presented a lecture + mini-activities (a taster-version) of the 3-hr See -> Sort -> Sketch workshop that I co-developed with Leah Buley. Steve Portigal (of Portigal consulting) presented “Well, we did all this research … now what?” His talk was also a revised version of a 3-hr workshop. He had folks working together on lightning rounds of a research brief.

The theme of the evening was getting from research insights to actionable ideas and designs. It’s a process that often falls prey to the “toss a report over a wall” phenomenon. I have nothing against big research reports (okay…I kinda do, but that’s a topic for another post.) What is frustrating is to see organizations invest significant resources in smart, insightful research, and then not have clear ways to transform these insights into action. Both See->Sort->Sketch and Steve’s workshop are different approaches to addressing this issue.

If you’re interested in the workshop deck and workbook, you can download them from the workshops and presentations page. You can also see Steve’s full workshop at EPIC in Chicago.

Another fun aspect of the evening was keeping some of the workshop feeling in a 40-minute talk. There were 3 sketching activities for the audience to do. It was somewhat tricky with logistics, but overall it seemed to work well. If you attended and have feedback, pop me an email at kate (at) adaptivepath (dot) com.

Big kudos to Christian Crumlish, the fearless organizer and envelope-pusher who coordinated the evening.