I’ve been reading Tim Brown’s Change by Design and I’m surprised at how much the principles in the book about design thinking resonate around what Johnnie Moore, Chris Corrigan, Anne Pattillo, Geoff Brown and I have been doing for the Show Me the Change Conference.

In collaboration with the conference organisers and hosts we’ve created a design team to bring some edgy thinking and practices to the delivery of what could have been yet another predictable conference. We’re thinking this conference will be anything but predictable.

Tim says “design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognise patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as functionality, to express ourselves in media other than words or symbols”. And while design thinking has mostly been applied to objects and their functionality, more and more the principles have been applied to services and experiences.

He also explains some other principles of design thinking:

• building on one another’s good ideas
• direct engagement with people
• genuine reciprocity of interests
• investigative learning
• exploring questions around ‘how might we…’?
• the challenge and excitement of applying design thinking to problems that matter
• finding ways to encourage individuals to move towards more sustainable behaviours

So it seems that a conference that explores complexity and the art of evaluation within a context of behaviour change for sustainability just calls out for design thinking.

Viv McWaters

Five of the post conference workshops have been confirmed. To read more goto our Conference Program Page where you can download a full description of ‘the conference’ and ‘post-conference’ workshops.

During the design stage, it was clear that pre-conference workshops wouldn’t work . Show Me The Change is all about exploration of the new edges in evaluating behaviour change. It’s about contributing our experience and challenging ourselves (& each other) to explore new ways of working together. So, by the end of Day 2 of the conference itself, we will be armed with new insights and new ways of viewing the world. We will be ready to learn about some of the ‘new edges’ in evaluating behaviour change from our keynote-facilitators.

Here is the summary of fantastic post conference workshops that we have confirmed so far …

The conference design team and steering committee have been working behind the scenes for the past 6 months to design and co-create a conference-with-a-difference. In complex contexts like evaluating behaviour change, a business-as-usual appraoch to conference design just isn’t good enough.

Today is GO-LIVE day for the conference registrations and post conference workshops. The full program can be viewed here.

You can read about the approach taken and the principles that sit behind the design of Show Me The Change here. The slideshow below is a more entertaining way of reading about ‘Our Approach’. Please take a couple of short minutes to click through the slideshow (in Full Screen mode) and look forward to seeing you on May 4th!

Geoff Brown – Conference Design Team