Scott Sullivan
Scott is the Head of North American Design Group at Ascendum, and helps to build products and services to assist people in making positive long-term changes to their behavior.
Prior to Ascendum, Scott was at Adaptive Path in San Francisco, later working on behavior-focused financial services at Capital One bank. With an arts-driven education and diverse influences, his work has run the spectrum from education to energy; finance to interactive performance art.
For more, keep up with Scott at scottsullivan.io.
Presentations
Leadership By Design 2020
Building Compound Designers Workshop
It’s useful for researchers to have a thorough understanding of the ideation process, because the ideation is going to be structured around the research findings and deliverables, which will be the result of specifically crafted research protocols. It’s equally as important for these researchers to have an awareness of Content Strategy, so that they can capture specific details in their research that can lead to an understanding of the how people use language to work through the problem space. Interface designers who can meaningfully interpret the provenance of research findings will be able to preserve the intent of strategic decisions when they run into a snag resulting from bringing abstract concepts into our dimensional world full of very real limitations.
Too often, design and designers exist in isolation. They will work on one part of the greater whole, be very good at that one thing, and then come to your company and suddenly something doesn’t quite click. Now when you’ve got ten or fifty, or four hundred designers who’ve worked at various levels of isolation on varied products and services, it can take a long time to get everyone on the same page. Design firms like Adaptive Path would specifically seek out designers who were t-shaped where the bar of the t was equally as developed as the stem. This very intentional generalism was useful for a number of reasons, but one that really stands out is that these designers have an ingrained awareness of how each part of the design process supports and relates to every other phase of the project. This workshop is the result of the need for these strong t-bars in a hiring environment based on keyword searches and hyper-specialization. It focuses on the cause and effect of different inputs, tools, and techniques, why they matter, and how they’re useful for all of the other parts of the process of building meaningful experiences for messy humans in complex circumstances.
UX Camp: Summer 2020
Lunch Break Discussion & Debate: CS + UX = BFFs?
Fresh off their critically acclaimed spoken word tour, friends and former colleagues Michaela and Scott discuss the relationship between Content Strategy and Experience design, delving into timeless questions such as Do humans actually have souls? and What’s a UX writer?.
This Frost/Nixon style discussion will probably definitely be audible over the sound of your chewing on the lunch break, and will haunt your lunch-related dreams for years to come.
UX Camp 2016
Wearable Devices & Everyone
Wearable devices are still in the “Wild West” phase, but we’re finally starting to learn enough about them that we can start making more intentional decisions. This talk will cover the entire wearable device ecosystem from raw data inputs to prescriptive feedback and emerging behavior change models.
Specific topics:
- Why the Apple Watch is electric garbage, for now
- Wearables for others: Narrative Clip vs Google Glass
- Non-quantitative wearable devices?
- The digital behavior change landscape
- Manual input doesn’t work
UX Camp 2013: Prototype Camp
Prototyping Sensor Networks!
This is an introduction to building connected environments. I’ll go over the main building blocks of what you need for a wireless sensor network, and show you how to get started making each “block.” This talk is intended for designers with little or no engineering ability who would like to start prototyping smart interactive environment-based experiences. I’ll give real world examples from a sensor network project I currently have deployed in a public space, and show exactly how data and feedback from the prototype has influenced the evolution of the system.
