Whether you call it user-centred, people-centred, or human-centred design, those organisations that are closest to their customers are the ones that succeed in creating successful products and services. Come learn practical tools to apply design thinking in your own business at two upcoming mini-workshops organised by Meet for Real and delivered by Justin Knecht of the Centre for Design Innovation.

Register for the 10th of October in Cork, or the 17th of October in Galway.

On the 30th of September, Enterprise Ireland is hosting an event to highlight the work of regional ARE centres, of which we are one. Here’s some more info on the event:

What: Building Technology Hubs in Regional Locations
Who: Enterprise Ireland’s Applied Research Centres (AREs)
Venue: National Maritime College of Ireland (NMCI), Ringaskiddy, Cork
When: Wednesday 30th September 2009 at 10am
Enterprise Ireland would like to invite you to attend Innovating for Regional Industry, a showcase for the Regional ARE Centres in the Institutes of Technology outlining their research and support for Irish industry. The ARE Centres have established an excellent track record in increasing their capacity to engage in R&D and have enabled over 100 companies to develop new products and processes to gain a competitive edge, increase sales and achieve export growth.

Download the agenda

This past week I attended the first of four thematic workshops as part of the Sharing Experience Europe (SEE) Interreg IVC project. Ireland is one of eleven European partners as well as one of five members of the Policy Recommendation Research Group. After each of the four thematic workshops, a research group partner is responsible for the publication of policy recommendations to be distributed to policy makers and governments. The first will be out in September on “integrating creativity and design into regional innovation policy.”

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Paul Hughes of Orientation Lab, an initiative of Lava Design, Netherlands and Reza Abedini will conduct a day long workshop that will focus on how to use design to address issues or audiences that go beyond local and conventional visual frames of reference. The purpose of this workshop is to improve participants’ skills in thinking about design work produced for contemporary diverse communities and organisations. It will be of interest to organisations targeted at diverse audiences, NGOs, heads of communication who commission design, graphic designers, visual arts/design academics.

27th May, NCAD Gallery, Thomas Street, Dublin, 10 – 4pm
The cost of the workshop is €80 including lunch
To book, contact ICAD, elaine@icad.ie

UX Workshops provides workshops around “User Experience” with highly experienced experts.

May 18: ‘Enterprise Information Architecture’ – Louis Rosenfeld
May 19: ‘Commercial Ethnography’- James Kalbach
May 20: ‘Personas and Mental Models’ – James Kalbach

Early bird pricing is available until April 2, 2009. Space is limited.

For the detailed program of the workshops, please visit www.uxworkshops.com or have a look at http://tinyurl.com/7fhlf5

Location of the workshops:
EMPIRE RIVERSIDE HOTEL
Bernhard-Nocht-Straße 97
D-20359 Hamburg
www.empire-riverside.de

Yes you can, and this is where you start.

Date: 25 March 2009
Time: 8:30
Location: Crowne Plaza, Northwood, Santry, Dublin 9

The benefit of this half day seminar focuses on how to create an innovative culture within your organization, and on the recently recognized role of standardization in innovation. We are all aware how important innovation is in the current climate – this timely seminar provides an opportunity to adopt a standardized approach to continuous innovation.

Key note speakers explore how standards offer innovators a level playing field, facilitating competition and interoperability between new and existing products, services and processes.

Each participant will receive a FREE copy of the NSAI ‘Guide to Good Practice in Innovation and Products Development Processes’ due to be launched at the seminar.

Want to know more, go to www.nsai.ie to review the full seminar details or you can call Eoin McCabe, telephone +353 (0) 807 3824.

Last Tuesday I attended the BizSpark Innovation Accelerator in Dublin, an event organised by Microsoft Ireland in collaboration with Digital Media Forum.

The Event brought together over 200 attendees from different backgrounds but most of them  having a common goal for the day: gathering information about starting up a business.

In my opinion the event was a success as it covered everything from Licensing Agreements to HR, from Founding to PR, from research to product management to increase profitability. I firmly believe that even though the information was presented at a high level there wasn’t one person present that didn’t learn something new on the day. I know I returned with pages of notes.

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The BizSpark Innovation Accelerator is an event organised by Microsoft Ireland in collaboration with Digital Media Forum, designed to help accelerate the Start-up businesses in Ireland and Northern Ireland.

The day-long event is scheduled to run on Tuesday, February 24th, in the Radisson SAS Royal Hotel in Dublin’s city centre. Entrance is free of charge.

The aim of the event is to provide business guidance for Start-ups and anyone in Ireland or Northern Ireland who thinks they might like to start-up a tech company. Topics will include stories from experienced Irish entrepreneurs, and practical advice from individuals and organisations who have been working with the local Tech Start-up community over the past few years.

If you are interested in the event you can register and find more information here.

Last week I attended the Learning And Technology World Forum – LATWF, a major world Education Ministers conference hosted by the UK government in London. Throughout the week I was part of the Learner’s Voice team composed of 7 students from all over the world. Our duty in this forum was to attend conferences and workshops, maintain a blog about the event and, on the last day, present a plenary in front of 400 delegates including 60+ Ministers of Education.

The most important part of the forum was the closed conference that brought together 60+ Ministers of Education representing countries from all around the world. This conference was about the next steps that countries need to take in order to include technology in their education systems. This was a disappointing session, as we witnessed ministers playing a game of ‘Show and Tell’ instead of trying to figure out answers to their problems. We have heard a lot of aims and ambitions and everybody was talking about ‘what we should do’, but no strategies or promises have been made.

The main issues on everyone’s agenda was changing the curriculum in order to fit the student’s needs and training teachers in order to understand technology better and adapt easier to the student’s needs. My question here was: have anyone asked the students what their needs are?

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