Speakers
Lisa Welchman
Lisa has spent 25 years designing digital team collaboration models for large, global organizations. She spends a lot of time thinking about how teams work together and how group dynamics influence the digital experiences designed and offered to others. Through time and experience, Lisa has developed insights into the dynamics that lead organizations to lose control of their digital product portfolio and create lower quality or harmful online experiences. She works with digital team leaders to help them understand these dynamics for their teams and make changes, so that collaboration models are healthier for team members and the digital products they create are solid.
Lisa is a lecturer in digital ethics and organizational collaboration at FH Joanneum in Graz, Austria. In addition, she offers cohort-based online digital governance training. Lisa is the author of Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design and the co-host of the Surfacing Podcast. To give the planet some breathing space, Lisa mostly stays close to her home in Utrecht these days but has spoken globally on digital governance for over 20 years. She hopes your life is good.
About the talk
Accountability in design leadership: What can I do when things don’t feel right?
Unethical design? What can I do?
There is a critical lens over digital products and services with the fallout from unsafe and unethical experiences in our digital world coming into focus. Many designers and makers are feeling the heat. We are trying to understand why and how we got here-and we are reacting. We leave jobs only to find ourselves in a similar position in a new company. Others stay in an organization but look the other way, or hold their breath, hoping the tide will turn. Others pick up a megaphone and are critical of demanding executives and other senior leaders.
In all these instances, we behave as if we are outsiders or victims of the system that creates these harmful products and services. We deny any significant accountability. But, more significantly, we give up our power and dishonor the expertise we have to help put things right.
In this talk, Lisa will talk about what individual digital designers and makers can do to address ethical concerns that come to their attention at work. The focus will be on building resiliency and confidence so people can regain a sense of personal ethical agency at work--even when things aren't perfect.