Creativity is traditionally though of as a solo activity, but many human endeavors leverage the creative power of groups. Agile uses group creativity to produce better products in shorter times. How do we support, enable and enhance the creative abilities of our teams? There are many ways to redefine the work environment for greater creativity. Many of them have been discovered through experience, experimentation and accident. Modern neuroscience suggests to us some guidelines for deliberately designing conditions to enhance creativity by explaining how our brains work, learn, integrate and create.

Creativity can manifest in several ways: creation of something new, refinement of something that exists and problem solving. We will present a summary of the literature that describes and demonstrates how creativity can be enhanced by providing a safe, nurturing environment, enhancing group interactions, pacing activities that utilize different sensory modes and trusting in the power of subconscious integration.

More and more companies are turning to embedded sensors and connected devices as a way to improve their service offerings and bring more value to their customers. This connected ecosystem of technology, services and value provides designers with an opportunity to look beyond the design of a screen interface (UI - user interface design) and embrace a more holistic approach to designing full experiences and solutions (UX - user experience design).

This case study will walk you through the opportunities (and challenges) we faced in designing an experience for a connected device. While UX practitioners have a myriad of tools available to them in their toolboxes, we will be focusing primarily on the use of these 3 tools:

1. Contextual research - its importance and the importance of who conducts it
2. Mapping and looking at how ecosystem mapping can be used to create a multi-layered map of technology, business, value and how mapping the physical can become important when designing for connected environments
3. Notification design and re-thinking how cues, such as visual, auditory and haptic, can come into play when you are no longer designing for a device and can, instead, integrate your design into the physical environment

... and how we leveraged them to create a design solution that integrates into both the physical and digital environment of our client.

Have you been to a restaurant lately? How was your experience? Would you go back? In the software industry, just like in restaurants, customers will come back if they’ve been offered a great experience. You’ve all had good and bad customer service experiences and there are some parallels to make in your day-to-day life in software development. So how can you make sure you satisfy your customer every time so they come back to you each time they have a new project? In this talk, you will learn about 7 easy to apply strategies about software and how you can help your team be a catalyst in your sales cycle.

“Communication is the largest single factor determining the types of relationships a person has.” – Virginia Satir

Communication is fundamental for strong teams. When communication doesn’t “flow” people have lower self-esteem, innovation is diminished, and team morale is lower. Understanding and recognizing communication patterns that are not authentic is the first step to improving those patterns, helping people and teams, grow to become more successful.

Inspired by Virginia Satir’s book “The New Peoplemaking”, this experiential workshop presents four communication coping patterns where communication and collaboration is not effective. Participants will practice these coping patterns to deepen their understanding; and, thereby helping to recognize the effect of the whole self not being represented during communication.

Cultural differences can be found in many situations and we'll talk about corporate cultures. Most often cultural gap becomes apparent when working with other companies, but in many cases you can find this gap even within the same company, between different departments or management layers.

How to deal with the gap in product vision and processes?

How to make Waterfall and Agile teams work successfully?

How to bridge the gap of different Agile implementations?

Here, at Macadamian, we deal with differences in corporate cultures on a daily basis. And at the same time, we are constantly evolving internally to retain our competitive edge, making sure all departments are aligned to achieve our goals.

We would like to share some examples of the problems we encountered of the years and the principles we are using to resolve them successfully.

Management teams are getting great results with the Agile methodologies but what do your team members really think of it. If you ask most developers, they will tell you that the Agile processes are getting in their way and are useless in their day to day operations. Originally, the methodology came from a manifesto that was all about empowering a team so how did it shift this way? During this presentation, we will take a look back at the original manifesto and explore some of the pitfalls that you might have fallen into. We will also look how we can get back to the core principles of Agile and empower your team.