2011 World Usability Day
Education: Designing for Social Change
November 10, 2011
6:00 P.M. EDT
Bloomberg
731 Lexington Avenue
New York, New York
CART Provider:
Jennifer M. Bonfilio, RMR-CBC-CCP
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>> The event will begin in ten minutes. Please begin to take your seat.


>> GLORIA: If you haven't already found a seat, please come inside and sit down. And we're
going to get started in about four minutes. Thank you.
Testing. All right. Grab a seat, everybody. We're getting ready to start. There you are. Is
that the Sachs Insights crew over there?
>> No, it's Ronnie.
>> GLORIA: All kinds of things going on over there.
>> Hello.
>> GLORIA: Tammy, I'm glad you could make it.
>> Oh, anytime.
>> GLORIA: Heard you weren't feeling so good.
>> Thank you.
>> GLORIA: All right, ladies and germs, I always like to say that. It is 7:00. So I guess we're
going to go ahead and officially kick off what will be the last event for NYC UPA for the year 2011.
Woo!
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(Cheers)
Glad to see so many people here tonight. My name is Gloria Petron, and I'm president of
NYC UPA, and that is the New York City chapter of the usability professionals association. For those
of you who signed up and have no idea what you signed up for, you just heard it might be this cool
thing and some people told but it so usability folks, very dangerous crowd.
(Laughter)
All right. So do we have any veterans in the audience tonight? Anybody who served in the
military? All right. We got a couple people. Anybody who has loved ones or friends or family who
are serving in the military? Lot of people. Cool. So I just wanted to give a nice shout-out to our
people in uniform who are serving abroad or have ever served because tomorrow is veteran's day.
Lot of us get off from work tomorrow but I think it's only fair to say something nice there.
(Applause)
Yes. Happy Veteran's Day, everybody.
Yeah. And so next we'd like to start off by making sure that we say thank you, say our proper
thank-yous to having such a great host. Our host is the one and only Bloomberg LP, ladies and
gentlemen.
(Cheers & Applause)
And here from Bloomberg to say a few words we have -- well, Shawn Edwards is like the
grand Poobah actually to whom we owe this lovely soireé tonight, and we have on his behalf to say a
few words we have Elaine Kwong and Fahd Arshad. Here we go.
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>> Thank you, Gloria. Shawn keeps this shorter than I will so I apologize in advance. On
behalf of Shawn Edwards, Bloomberg, the CTO office in which dean of Bloomberg sits and all the UX
Team members, welcome. We are -- one of the perks of working at Bloomberg is this awesome
office space that we have, and it's always a pleasure to share that with fellow colleague and to show
them how inspirational these workspaces are. I've given tours to people who come and say, oh,
yeah, that's pretty and then I sort of see people like this crowd who actually understand what it
means to have an inspirational workspace as opposed to just a pretty workspace.
Quickly, another perk we have is our job announcements so we are hiring in case you haven't
noticed in the past three years, we've been blasting everywhere and nowhere with job positions. We
have positions open for visual designers -- Ali, Ali, Ali, oh, there's our visions -- so we're hiring for
visual design. We're hiring for usability. Ashley. Ashley's right here.
>> Ashley, stand up.
>> Everybody can see Ashley.
>> Hi, Ashley.
>> Ashley, by the way, just a secret, is also nominated for the international board of directors
for UPA.
>> Yeah!
(Cheers).
>> So every person who's a UPA member must vote. It's one of the secret things that's on the
back of your badge. We are hiring for prototyping. Where's Armand? Get up. Stand up, please.
>> Where's ZQ? ZQ's back there.
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>> I'm making you stand up to you see their faces and grab them if you want to talk about this
towards the end. So we're hiring for prototyping. We're hiring -- where's my UX team? Stand up,
please, please, please, please, all of us. No? Ben, patty, guys, talk to these guys. Grab them. See
these faces.
>> Richard in the back.
>> Yes.
>> They must still be outside.
>> He even looks guilty, doesn't he? Right?
(Laughter)
So we're hiring for (indiscernible) and smart creative people across all these disciplines.
We're looking for a good project manager, somebody to get things executed.
And I think we actually have Andrew in the crowd somewhere. Yes? No? Okay. Well,
Armand can you please stand up. He can -- yes.
(Laughter)
Stop playing with your iPhone.
(Laughter)
He's probably fixing some word problem. Anyway, not a lot of people know this, we are not -we're a media company but we're really a technology company. We are.
>> Woo!
(Laughter)
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>> Third best technology company on Wall Street or something like that. We think we're the
best. I don't know who the other two are. Screw them.
(Laughter)
Sorry. I know -- I doubt there are many technologies in the crowd -- technologists in the
crowd, right? But if there happen to be one or two technologists, please grab these guys and talk
about how we use jaws crib, how we use sort of the best technologies that are out there. You'd be
surprised.
If you look in your bags, I promise this is wrapping up, about you look in your -- if you look in
your bags you will see more details about the job positions if you're interested. There's a -- thank
you, Elaine, there's something in there that also has -- by the way in case you missed it, we're raffling
off -- if you apply for a UX position, 64 gigabyte, 3G Wi-Fi, yadda, yadda, yadda, iPad.
>> And a cover.
>> And a cover. It's fully loaded. So please look for that.
(Applause)
Also a little flyer. There's a little flyer in there about our founding partner and the person we
work for, Tom Secunda. You'll see the roots -- I would love to take credit. If you take a couple of
seconds to scan through that, you'll notice that UX is embedded in the roots of the work. These
people were talking about UX when I don't know how many people amongst us were even in the field
but there weren't that many people at start-up tech companies that were hedging their bets that user
experience is the way to go. My boss -- I don't know they're here or not, but if our first customer had
their way, the thing that Mike Bloomberg would have sold them was a conveyor belt with tickets. Had
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no idea when we showed up with a physical device that that's what we're sending them. So user
experience is part of our root ingrained from way back when.
Did I miss anything?
>> Steve.
>> Oh, yes, yes, yes. How many of you saw the Business Week special edition for Steve
Jobs? Okay. So a lot of people didn't get a chance. A lot of people are looking for this we decided
that since there's nothing else in the bag that you actually want to look at we'll put one thing in
there -(Laughter)
That is a specially printed edition for you of the Steve Jobs edition. Just to give a collector's
edition. I have mine already on my wall.
(Laughter)
I'm not a groupie, but -(Laughter)
So thank you very much for joining us. Thank you, UPA, for making this possible. Thank you.
And please enjoy yourselves. There's an after party. We will be usability lab and you should grab
Ashley or Elaine or any of the IX people or whoever and we'll be happy to walk you over. We're on
the same floor as the usability lab. There will be food and drinks. So please enjoy yourselves and
thank you very much for putting up with us.
(Applause)
>> Usability lab. But you can't tell anybody what you saw.
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(Laughter)
You think I'm kidding.
I had to sign something you won't believe. It basically says I will behave myself. But -- all
right. So what is NYC UPA, a quick crash course, how many people are first-timers? This is your
first UPA -- wow. I really want to welcome you guys. For those of you who have -- who I see a lot of
familiar faces, you guys know what my spiel is, if you have been here for a while, and you see
somebody who's new, I place a lot of emphasis on congeniality. Please do make new people feel
welcome. This is not a snob group. Okay? We need to relevance the practice and make things
more user friendly and, therefore, I really would like people to make sure you reach out to somebody
and make them feel at home. All right? We have a LinkedIn site where I encourage people who
contact me, like I have a job to post, you can put it on NYC UPA's group page on LinkedIn. You
have my permission. Go for it.
We even have a little spinoff group that I created called UPA apartment listings for anyone
who's moving to the city and is looking for a UX job. You know? Hasn't got an lot of traffic yet, but
we'll give it a few more months before we decide to pull the plug on it. You about I would like to give
it some -- but I would like to give it some time. We have a Facebook fan page, a Twitter page which
is NYCUPA. Everything you see tonight was organized by people on top of their day jobs. So we
are always looking for volunteers. We grow our volunteer team very slowly, but it is the best group of
people I've ever had the fortune of working with. So keep that in mind if you're interested in
volunteering. The address you can contact us at a volunteer@nycupa.org. A quick pipeline update
as to what our next event is going to be. We usually take December off. We kind of need it. So the
next event that we have scheduled is for Tuesday, January 24th, and that will be Steven Gates who
presented for us earlier this year. Many of you saw his presentation at Starwood Hotel. That was a
good one. He's agreed to speak for us again in January. And if you are interested in presenting for
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NYC UPA I've set up an email address called submissions@nycupa.org. This is really -- like we
haven't had a chance to kick off the call for presenters officially, but now I am. So figure a room full
of this many people is a good place to start. If you or someone that you know is interested in
presenting, if you've seen someone who has presented that you think would be a great presenter for
us, we have several months in 2012 that are open. So be sure and send that our way.
So housekeeping. Cell phones off, please or set to vibrate so we don't have anything going
off in the middle of the presentation. That includes me. Hang on here. Let's see. Jobs. How many
of you saw the link that I circulated to everybody to submit job postings? Okay. Great. So we will try
and make those nice and short. We'll send those out in the post-event survey message that we'll
send out tomorrow. And let's see. Oh. If you are here and -- if you're somebody who is hiring here
in the audience tonight, we actually made something for you that will help you stand out from the
crowd, and there are actually little props that we have around the corner. We'll give those to you at
the end of the event so we're not looking around, oh, raise your hand if you're hiring. We'll try to
hook you guys up so that if you're hiring and if you're looking, you'll have a better social experience
tonight. Fairly low tech. Okay.
So now my favorite part of the event should be yours too. I call it shake hands with your Uncle
Steve. This goes along the lines of getting to know people whether you like it or not. Please turn to
the person to your right and for five minutes, just say hi and talk.
>> You're just going to read here? Hi, how are you? I'm Mark. So I work for Olympus
cameras. I'm director of marketing. I work in the city. Do you -- where do you work? Where do you
live?
>> SVETLANA: I work for NYU as a web producer. What ->> Cool.
>> SVETLANA: What made you interested in user experience?
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>> I think it's a differentiator, so even with cameras and consumer products, right, it's about
the user experience and the ease of use. So you can always build something. Olympus is Tokyo
R&D company, so a lot of times we have concerns with things that are not easy to understand, takes
an engineer to understand them. So it's really all about the consumer's brand, like Apple is a brand,
right? It's about intuitive point, touch, click.
>> SVETLANA: Why marketing Olympus, why not, say, Nikon or Canon? Those are famous
camera brands.
>> Why? True. Unfortunately, Olympus doesn't spend as much on advertising. But our
products are just as good or better.
>> GLORIA: All right. Very friendly crowd.
>> Nice to meet you.
>> GLORIA: Now it's time for the moment you've all been waiting for. World Usability Day.
This is an event that probably started I guess in Boston by Elizabeth Rosenzweig maybe six years
ago or so and has simply -- just grown. It's all over the world now. It's simply the high holy day of the
usability community.
(Laughter)
You know? I'm really wondering if we should turn this into a costume event or black tie event.
(Cheers)
Think about that next year maybe. It is basically all over the city and all over the world, nerds
just like us who ->> We're not nerds!
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>> We're very cool nerds.
>> Some of us.
(Laughter)
>> GLORIA: All right. All right. I'm the nerd.
(Laughter)
And as a matter of fact, I'll give you a little story here of how tonight's event kind of ended up
coming to be. I'd like to kick this off by saying a long time ago in an office building down in SoHo, we
were trying to put together the panel for this year's world usability event. I was talking to Tammy,
Tammy and her team really helped pull this whole thing together, and turns out that as they were
casting the net for potential speakers, she ran across a guy named Mark Randall, and Mark Randall,
sounds like an interesting guy. So they finally get to talking. Yes, yes, I would be interesting in
presenting for World Usability Day. Well, we've got to meet. Where are you located? They work in
the same building, two doors away from each other.
(Laughter)
In fact, they've been having conversations on the way to and from the bathroom which is ->> Oh, no!
>> GLORIA: For years. They never knew who they were. This event actually brought the two
of them together. So you want to talk about a small world. This is really a case of a small world.
So Mark, you are the founder -- the principal of Worldstudio. You've been there for about 15
years. And your organization, your company serves for-profit and nonprofit organizations. And really
I'm going to let Mark tell you the rest and kick this off. Thank you. Welcome, Mark Randall.
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(Applause)
>> MARK: Thank you, Gloria. So I'm really glad to be here. It's a really exciting to get a
chance to meet all of you people. So I'll start off sort of by saying that in the past few years, there's
been this really unprecedented surge in the field for design for social advocacy or as it's being called
social design. Creative professionals are looking for ways in which to incorporate more meaningful
social change not work that they do every day. And this kind of I think in response to interest from
corporations and nonprofits that are often kind of engaged in this kind of often overused term of using
our skills in design thinking. Colleges and universities across the country are responding to student
demand that design and strategy around social issues being incorporated into their curriculums.
But the challenge can be how should we engage in this kind of work and how should
corporations and nonprofits utilize our skills? This evening we're going to explore the field of social
design with an emphasis on how the internet, mobile and interactive technology can be leveraged to
engage and ignite positive social change.
We'll start in the realm of education. Within the past few months, I've attended two
symposium that brought together representatives from about 30 schools to talk about how colleges
and universities can fold social design into their curriculums. There's an incredible amount of
passion and excitement around the subject, and everyone is struggling with how to go about it in the
most efficient way.
I myself run a six-week graduate-level summer program called Impact design for social
change at the School of Visual arts and this program attracts students from all over the world, which
really shows that this sort of interest in social design is not just a U.S.-based phenomenon. The
program that I run runs on two parallel tracks. The first is the development of a non-client-based
project. Really in the realm of social entrepreneurship where you help your own project. The second
track we partner this teams of students with New York City nonprofit organizations to tackle one of
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their challenges which is more of like a client relationship. Many schools are launching full-fledged
master's programs, so, for example, this fall the Maryland College of Art inaugurated arts and social
design. The students live, study and work in the underserved community of east Baltimore where
they support community development, revitalization, and the health and well being of the
neighborhood. The program operates under the concept of embedded design. So often designers
come in. They work on a project, and then they leave without really having a deep understanding of
the needs of that community. I actually heard somebody call that parachute design where you just
kind of come in, land, and then leave.
By having the students immerse themselves in the community they come to understand the
issues in a much more comprehensive way. As usability professionals, you all know the value of
understanding your audience and their needs. It's really the root -- at the root of what you do. The
other thing that I think is really great about this MICA program is they're working in their own
backyard. It's wonderful to want to help families in Africa, but there are plenty of issues that need to
be addressed right around the corner. Issues that you will have a much better sense of because
they're located in your own community.
To get things started, I'll tell you a little bit about a program that we launched out of my
business Worldstudio called designing identification change. We do this in partnership with adobe.
We'll have thesis presentations from the School of Visual arts designers as master's programs, Irina
Lee and Tyler Mintz. The majority of work we do as creative professionals is really service-based.
We work for clients. What's great about these thesis projects that these graduate students have
done is that they are really entrepreneurial project this is these are self-started projects that they are
actually now out -- now that they've graduated, Irina graduated two years ago, they're out in the real
world trying to implement.
So I'll start by showing you a little video. I believe that kind of planting the seeds of this kind of
thinking around design and social change can really start in high school. And here's one way that we
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at Worldstudio go about doing it.

So that's just a project that we did called design -(Applause)
So -- thank you. Thank you. I actually thought I would just very, very briefly just sort of tell
you a little about how our company's structured. This is our Worldstudio guy. We think of our
organization like our brain. It's client-based marketing design and program services for civic and
nonprofit organizations. And then just like you have to have a brain, you have to have a heart. So
our heart is collaborative, social impact projects for corporations and nonprofits. And so as an
example of one of these, a program that I mentioned earlier is design ignites change, which we've
done for the past three years with -- in collaboration with the folks at Adobe who are great supporters
of ours. So design ignites change engages high school and college students in multidisciplinary
design and architecture problems that address pressing social issues. So, for example, these
students from the Corcoran College of Art and design develop programs to fight traffic congestion
and pedestrian fatalities in Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C. has some of the highest -- worst
traffic congestion in the country and also the highest number of pedestrian fatalities. They kind of
beta tested their ideas out on the street and they managed to end up on the evening news. They
also caught the attention of the Washington, D.C., Department of Transportation who's really
seriously considering adopting their concepts for the City of Washington, D.C. So this is really
exciting for the students.
We also have youth mentoring programs, which are self-guided programs for underserved
high school students and college mentors. And this is where the billboard project you saw the video
from originated.
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So we've done this program in about 18 cities around the country. These are two -- a team
from students -- a student from Metropolitan State University in Denver, Colorado, and his mentor
and they designed the billboard which ended up in downtown Colorado. So I can say we've done
this program in cities all across the country.
You know, one of the other things that's really a challenge about working in this field is just
there's a big missing link that we've discovered. We as designers and you guys as usability folks,
you know, we're really great at concept. We're also really great at execution. But if we want to do
sort of self-motivated projects, the one big thing that we're really terrible at or at least I'm really
terrible at is funding. Like how the hell do you pay for this kind of stuff?
(Laughter)
So in order to address that, he have a really great -- we have a really great series of
workshops called funding social change which we've done for organizations like AIGA across the
country and we've also done in colleges and universities around the country.
We also have what we call our Design Ignites Change Implementation Awards. Today we've
given almost $75,000 to help students around the country actually implement these projects within
their local communities. And one of the students that we're going to hear from tonight, Irina Lee, was
a recipient in 2010 of one of our implementation awards, and we hope that it helped bump her project
to the next level.
But she's doing great on her own so she'll tell but that in a second.
Everything that we do is really driven by our website, because we have schools all across the
country that engage with our website. We have over 300 social change projects that are on the
website from colleges and universities, 55 colleges and universities across the country, which you
can check out. There's our address.
And then these are kind of our results to date. So we've got 30 -- I won't really read it, but we
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were actually quite impressed with ourselves. We love our program, and we're gearing up for next
year. So that's just a little bit about Design Ignites Change but kind of just sort of talks to the interest
that this idea of social design has in colleges and universities across the country. I mean, we're one
of the first people that have really kind of brought everybody to the -- to one table at such a public
level.
So actually, I'm now going to turn over the mic to our first presenter, Irina Lee, and I'm very
excited that she's here. And I know she's excited to be here too.
(Applause)
>> IRINA: Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for coming. I'm Irina Lee. I'm really excited to
be here. I'm the founder and executive director of First Person American and what started as my
master's graduate thesis has since involved into a -- evolved into a fully funded initiative. First
Person American was inspired by my own personal story. I immigrated to the United States from the
Soviet Union 20 years ago. And we didn't know anyone when we came. But for me over the year
the simulation became easier. And my own personal experience of becoming American had to do
with getting together with other people and sharing stories because I think that it's always about
these simple acts like storytelling that gets people together and gets people excited. So First Person
American is a initiative that focuses on what it means to be an American from the immigrant's point of
view.
The mission is to change the public's perception of immigration and to interject a new voice
through deep and poignant portraits of people that came to America.
The key component is a content-driven website through personal stories, visual
documentation, and interactive media. Each participant is featured with a video interview, a map of
the person's journey to America, related cultural links and much more. So this editorial contextual
layer helps the website become a rich source of information.
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In the process I met hundreds of incredible collaborators and participants. I've met
participants like Eric who came to America in 2001 to Tulsa, Oklahoma, with his family, and raised
without religion and in his interview Eric talks about encountering southern Baptists and praying in
the parking lot of a grocery store with customers who were really overzealous to help him find God.
(Laughter)
And over the past 18 months through funding, my team and I have reported over 17 new
stories, and we continually look for participants that are interested in being involved.
First Person American partnered with the people of the America center at the Ellis Island
foundation and museum. Together this project will speak to the next wave of immigrants and
promote the idea that storytelling and design can have a positive social impact.
I've also collaborated with a PBS documentary called welcome to Shelbyville to produce pilot
episodes called Welcoming Stories. Welcoming Stories is a series of episodes featuring immigrants
telling their own story of a person that welcomed them when they first came to America.
And what's next for me is taking First Person American into the classrooms to empower youth.
Right now I'm collaborating to create a curriculum integration workshop at new Karmis High School
which is a 100% immigrant high school in Long Island city. And the goal of these workshops is to
integrate critical thinking, design thinking, and hands-on learning to have the students produce,
capture, and share their own stories.
I'd like to conclude my short presentation with Nika's Pilot, which is my favorite episode of
Welcoming Stories. And to me, the beauty of this story and all the stories that I've produced are the
human imperfections and the unscripted moments that make this work real for me.
(Video playing)

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>> When I was 11, my mom and my cousin, they told me we're going to go on vacation to
Italy. So we got on the plane, and my cousin, who was maybe -- she was like 17, 18 back then, she
was like, you know we're not coming back. And I was like, what do you mean we're not coming
back? Like, I didn't really get it, you know? I said, but I left my Barbie.
(Laughter)
My mom's like, don't worry, we'll get you lots of Barbies. We're going to go to America.
>> My name is Domenica, and I came here from Warsaw, Poland, in 1989. And this is my
Welcoming Story. My uncle was living here, and he was the one who sponsored us here. First day
of school I didn't speak English that well. I remember -- (dog lapping water).
(Laughter)
I turned around and somebody said something to me and my thing back then was say no or
yes. Even though I didn't know what they were asking. And she said something and I was like, no.
And then I realized later that she asked me for an eraser and I had one like right there on my table.
(Laughter)
Well, the teacher was there first in the English second language class and she helped me a lot
the first two, three months. So one time we're in class. I don't remember what was happening or -but my teacher said something, and I said, don't put words into my mouth. And she made this face.
So I was like, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. And she was like, no, no, no, this is great. This means that you're
learning English, that you're getting it. And I was like, okay. Well, I heard it on Three's Company.
(Laughter)
So that was my favorite show.
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(Laughter)
Because of the teasing and not knowing the English so well, I was a pretty shy kid. But in that
class, she brought out my personality more. If I saw her again, I would tell her thank you for believing
in me and telling me that I will succeed, that I kind of made it. I mean, I think I pretty -- you know,
made it.
(Laughter)
I went to NYU. I worked in publishing and work -- I help other people with their writing and
their English and their grammar. So who would have thought back then that I would be doing that
now.

(video ends).
(Applause)
>> IRINA: Thank you. Thanks so much. So in closing, this is just the beginning for First
Person American. And I invite all of you to participate by going online, going to First Person
American.org, joining our blog. Thank you so much for having me here. It's been a real honor.
(Applause)
Tyler is next.
>> TYLER: Hello, everybody. As Irina said and the slide says, my name is Tyler Mintz. And
I'll say hello again.
(Laughter)
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So I'd like to tell you a couple stories about my childhood. This is pretty much what it looked
like. I could open the back door and pick raspberries in the morning if I wanted to. I canned a lot of
tomato sauce in my day with my parents. At one time brought a duck in for show and tell because I
thought that was pretty fascinating.
(Laughter)
I rode a goat thinking it was a horse after my sister told me so.--and so on and so forth. And
this is the house I grew up. I was so connected to the land that I grew up on. We waited till June for
strawberries. Corn was knee-high by July. And dinners were definitely mandatory at my parents'
house. And this is how most of America eats unfortunately or this is somewhat people do when they
go shopping. They see this big mass of food products, right? Products of food science. So I wanted
to create something that would make people more aware of where the food came from that they're
eating and what was in it and just the whole story. So here you'll see two apples and they have really
different stories, one from upstate New York traveled only about 80 miles to get here, and one is from
a long, long, long way away. And I don't think that people necessarily think about this when they buy
food or eat it. And I don't know if they really want to so I wanted to create something that would
make it a little more exciting and a little more sexy to think about this kind of stuff.
And there's already a lot of people doing great work in this field because of what's going on
with the food epidemic Arnold the whole world, not -- around the whole world, not just America. The
way I see it, though, to overgeneralize it, it comes into two categories, the far left and the far right.
On the one side you have people that scare you and not make want to think about your food. On the
other side you have people who make locally grown food look really delicious and inexpensive and
accessibility. Right in the middle there's a void which people are already doing work in this field. But
I want to make something that was attractive and accessible both aesthetically and as a proposition
to jump onboard and say, hey, this could be really cool or really fun or delicious or cheap or what
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have you.
So I'd like to introduce to you Foodstalk. Foodstalk is a multi-platform event. It's a way to
come together and talk about locally grown food in New York City.
And there's three components to it. There's campaigns that live in the real world on the
streets as well as on the internet. There is the website which is really a starting place for people to
access and find locally grown food. And there are a small series of events where people can really
taste it to believe it or see it to believe it.
So to really quickly run through some of the print campaigns, they come straight from my
heart. It's pictures of me and my family. The point of the campaign is to tell storytelling to connect to
these posters and not scare them away with pictures of sugar poured into soda bottles that we've all
seen too many times.
And the other point of the campaign is to point people in the direction of website. So I'd like to
play a little clip of one of the campaigns that lives on the internet. I'm going to have to cut it short
because the kind of long but you'll get the point really quick.

Sorry. It arrives in New York City. It goes on to show -- you.
(Laughter)
-- the story of the apple from upstate New York that gets here in like an hour. So a large
aspect of Foodstalk is the website. Foodstalk.org. And it's just a tool and a resource. There's a
slight little manifesto about why you should eat locally grown food, nothing too preachy. There's a
section here where you can see recipes that I've constructed myself, things I like to cook. And I think
it is an important part of the site because it tells you where everything comes from. You could buy it
yourself if you wanted to. It breaks it down in terms of how far things have traveled, the cost of it,
which I also think is important because it's a really big common misconception that locally grown food
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costs too much but if you look at this info graph, four people, less than $5 per person. And you'd be
hard-pressed in New York City to go get a big Mac, a coke and some fries for that much money.
That that doesn't mean you're going to want to cook.
(Laughter)
I encourage to you log in. There's a ton of stuff to look at there, like all these campaigns.
Here's another view of campaign telling stories of comparing beef from Argentina to beef right down
the street.
So here's what the events can look like, small intimate, fun, exciting, way for people to engage
with one another and people producing food locally in New York. Here's one of the takeaways from
the events which is also downloaded for free off the web site. It's information graphic explaining
what's in season when. Because if you eat locally grown food, you have to eat what's in season
where you live.
And here's a little pocket version because can't bring a poster with you.
(Laughter)
And so I'd love to connect with all of you. We have a website. We're on Twitter. We're on
Facebook. I'd like to conclude with a video.

(Applause)
Thank you all.
>> MARK: Well, thank you. You know, I think that what's really to me I find exciting about
both these projects is so often when you're in school, student works within the wall of the school
where it ends up in a portfolio, but I think the fact that both Tyler and Irina is are working to make
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their projects a reality and actually hopefully earn a living from them in a sustainable way is really
fantastic, and it's a really great model for ways that we as designers can do this kind of work. So, like
I said, you know, just as many colleges and universities are looking for ways to tackle social issues,
so is the professional community. Recently, a number of professional initiatives have been launched
which maybe you've all heard about. The Designer's Accord is a global coalition of designers, and
business Liz leaders working together to promote positive social impact. This initiative was started
by Valerie Casey in 2007 who at the time worked for IDEO. I'm sure everybody knows IDEO in this
room. I think they have something like over 200,000 adopters of the designer accord globally. It's
caught fire and taken on a really -- it's attracted a lot of attention. Another organization was started in
2009 by a group of designers in San Francisco in collaboration with the AIGA's Center for
Sustainable Design. The living principles is a framework for driving positive cultural change. These
are just two examples of initiatives and actions that are springing up all over the place. The fact that
we're here today, I think, is a real testament to the enthusiasm around this subject. What I think is
really critical is that we just don't think of this as a passing trend. Right now there are a lot of good
intentions out there, but these good intentions really need to be turned into action. There are
individuals committed to doing this work all over -- doing this work over the long term and we're really
fortunate to have four of them with us here today. I love this quote. John Kennedy said, "One
person can make a difference and everyone should try." Tyler points it out too through Foodstalk.
We have a really fantastic group today, and each of them is going to present a case study about how
they're tackling social issues through design and technology. First up is Asi Burak. He's copresident
with Michelle Byrd of Games for Change, founded in 2004, Games for Change facilitates the creation
and distribution of social impact games that serve as critical tools and humanitarian and educational
efforts. In 2009, our next speaker, Michelle Mullineaux, along with Ed Shlossberg, both from ESI
Design started desigNYC, an organization that matches local nonprofits with creative professionals
here in New York City from a range of disciplines who were willing to donate their services pro bono.
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This is another way that we as the design community can get engaged in these issues is through
pro-bono work.
Our third presenter is Katrin Verclas. She's the cofounder of MobileActive.org which connects
people, organizations, and resources using mobile technology for social change. The more than
5 billion mobile phones around the world provide unprecedented opportunities for organizing
communications and service and information delivery. And last but not least Whitney Quesenbery
from WQ usability who many of you know in this room. Whitney is an experienced researcher with a
passion for clear communication. She also leads the Usability In Civic Life Project, mobilizing user
experience professionals to participate in civic design projects, one of which she will present today.
Each presentation, like Irina and Tyler, will flow, one from the other, and then we'll all come up
on stage to have a discussion. There's gonna be two ways that you can participate in the discussion.
We're going to project a live Twitter feed so that you can post questions and comments, and I
screwed up and didn't show you the hash tag but it's right there!
(Laughter)
Is the hash tag. So make note of this. We'll project it again later on.
>> It's in the program.
>> MARK: Oh, it's in the program too. We're also going to have microphones so we can ask
questions. So we want to kind of do this Twitter feed, live discussion, town forum thing. We hope
you'll all get really engaged and join us in this great conversation. But first up is Asi Burak and
Games for Change.
(Applause)
>> ASI: Hi, everyone. I have a confession to make that I drank one beer outside.
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(Laughter)
So if I start with one, two, three and I forget the third one -(Laughter)
Let's drink beer. How many of you play video games? Nice. 50%. How many think video
games are blacking the most dominant media -- becoming the most dominant media in the world?
Nice. Could be on phones as well. So I'm running this organization. It's a nonprofit called Games
for Change. Think of this as an umbrella organization like the Sundance for video games that tried to
change something and promote a cause or convey messages, and I want to show you a quick ABC
news clip to give us the context.
>> From ABC news headquarters in New York, this is World News.
>> And Games for Change. The popular new video game designed to save the world.
Coming up after a quick break, it sounds like a computer programmer's fantasy and a parents'
fantasy as well -- video games that do good. Video games are often accused of wasting time or even
promoting violence. But there are some popular new games that have a pretty lofty goal -- saving the
world. Here's ABC's Andrea Canning.
>> I'm the officer in charge of this mission. Our job is to get an accurate picture of the food
crisis.
>> Your mission in the video game ->> There will be no harvest this year.
>> Sheylan may be fictitious, but the video has been downloaded, and it brings issues like the
environment and the Darfur crisis to your fingertips. Getting involved is part of the game.
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>> Survival of the camp is also assisted by you spreading the word about the game and about
Darfur.
>> Think of the concept as the opposite of the ultra popular and ultra violent grand theft auto.
>> We think games have the potential to have a positive and powerful impact on society.
Games are really good for exploring complex social issues.
>> And there's no issue more complex than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Peacemaker is a
game where gamers can achieve Mideast peace.
>> You can dive into the situation and make decisions. This is very, very powerful.
>> At this institute in Tel Aviv, they use peace maker to help teenagers understand the conflict
better.
>> I played on the Palestinian side and suddenly I saw what was going on in their side.
>> The maker ->> ASI: Okay so. So me this is kind of the first generation. They're early success stories but
they were usually one-player games very isolated. I think we're moving into a new era that is much
more interesting, and I would think about games and game-like experiences and I want to speak
briefly about half the sky, which is going to be my example for something that kind of tests those
boundaries. Half the sky is a very ambitious transmedia project, which means there are many entries
to this story. It involves around the book called Half the Sky, about women and girls' empowerment
and the idea is they tell very compelling stories about women and girls that go from oppression to
opportunity and become social leaders and even business leaders (go from oppression). We have
many different components, gaming components, TV components, web components and all in
different ways to have the same story and convey the same messages to different audiences.
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At the center of this project there is a big event, it's going to be a year from now, Thanksgiving
next year, a TV show on PBS, two consecutive nights, two hours every night, nine countries, those
stories of women and girls, and celebrities traveling to those countries.
Games for Change is the executive producer in the game aspect of the project, and again, the
idea here is with games we can reach people that are not necessarily going to read Nick Kristof in
"The New York Times" or turn on PBS to watch this show and we want to go for Facebook. And
what we're going to do on Facebook and launch before the TV show is a very cool idea which is
you're playing this game that is taking a lot of the mechanics of Farmville but you are building a
village to take care of its residence. And especially the women and girls in that village. But the
interesting aspect of this game is that we work with a network of 50 NGOs that they're all engaged
with Half the Sky and every reaction can support one of those 50 NGOs by your choice. So if buy a
goat, it will go to a different international and it will support a donation of a goat in the real world. And
if you create a collective of women in your village in the virtual world, it will go to support care in
doing the same thing in the real world. And another component I want to quickly describe is the
mobile games. So here we're talking about different audiences. It's not this global audience that the
Facebook game would have, raising awareness. It would be really directly affecting the women and
girls on the ground. How you can affect them if not by mobile phones, which are in many places in
India and Africa, for example, are more dominant than internet. And you can find them in every
home and you can make very simple games for them, almost like going in a time machine five years
ago to the generation of feature phones with small screens, but they could be very effective. So
we're doing four games with an Indiana developer that is going to -- Indian developer. I want to show
you just two just to demonstrate the concept. This one is called worm attack. It's a big issue in India.
It's not only a health issue. They lose their focus and they don't go to classes because they have no
energy. Worm attack teaches them a very simple lesson. Those worms are coming at you on the
screen from top to bottom and pills is what you do to fight them. The solution is that simple. If you
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take one pill once a year, you get over with worms in that easy manner. The other game we're
making is attacking another issue, and there is a big compliance issue of pregnancy. We call it nine
minutes. And takes the nine month, compresses them to nine minutes of play session, and every
minute is one level, and it's all about what you should do and what you should -- shouldn't do while
pregnant. And it's targeted at women and girls that are pregnant and they can very quickly learn
what's right, what's wrong, nutrition, other issue, visiting clinics, etc. So that was a very high-level
overview of Half the Sky. But again to demonstrate a new generation what we can do, transmedia,
social games, mobile games on very simple devices, so games are really becoming more diverse
and more powerful every day. Thank you very much.
(Applause)
>> MICHELLE: Hi. I'm Michelle Mullineaux. VP. Marketing and business development at
ESI Design and also the cofounder of desigNYC. For those of you who don't know ESI Design, we're
in New York, that specializes in creating interactive experiences and communication networks that
really leverage the power of collaboration to create transformative change. And one of the projects
that we're really proud of in the last couple of years that really fits nicely into this theme tonight is the
project called the action center that we he created that is a wonderful development organization and
it's both a digital experience as well as a physical experience that you can see in their Portland
headquarters.
Another just quick project is the Dream Cube that we created last year as part of the Shanghai
World Expo. Demonstrates the idea of how do you get a City of Size of Shanghai to co-create a
more sustainable future? It was a huge 4,000-square-foot building that was wrapped in LEDs and
this interactive immersive theater. People did activity that triggered the LEDs on the building. It was
a cool kind of interactive concept about how you can get people to think about co-creation and
collaboration.
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But really the core reason why I'm here tonight is to talk about social impact and specifically
desigNYC, but before I get there, I want to give some props to the educational focus that Mark was
talking about earlier and I had the honor of working and getting my -- at the Presidio School which
focuses on environmental and social impact and certainly if any of you are out there interested in
talking about these interesting master's programs that are out there and integrating design,
sustainability, strategy, there's some really great stuff out there, and we'd all be happy to kind of talk
to you about it.
But on to desigNYC, I finished the Presidio in 2008 in the middle of the great recession, and I
think all of us are really feeling at this moment in time that there were a ton of nonprofits and really
amazing community groups that were really being contracted through what was happening in the
economic environment. And that all of us in the design field were really also at the same time kind of
feeling this groundswell of interest in terms of wanting to do something more meaningful, wanting to
kind of put our passion into play and how do we kind of find this creative outlet for civic engagement,
and we sort of stand on the shoulder of great organizations like architecture for humanity or tap root
foundation or public architecture group and doing things in different spaces but can we kind of take
the best of what they were doing and become a bridge and act as a conduit between connecting
nonprofits that really were in need of resources and designers that were really eager to kind of create
positive social impact? So in 2009, without really knowing what we were doing, we launched an
organization and started to prototype some projects and started to connect nonprofits and designers,
so we're just about to embark on our third year. This is a sampling of 12 of the projects we did in our
first year.
But in terms of what makes us unique, just as Mark was saying earlier, a lot of organization
focus internationally but we're rooted in the local. How do you become hyper local? How do you
effect change in your local communities and your local networks? And we're truly multidisciplinary.
So if you're an architect, a landscape designer, a user designer, we find ways to use your expertise
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with nonprofits that might need skills in that level of expertise.
And there's a lot of groups that getting involved in this, and we think for us what's most
important is that we're doing something that creates impact. So we -- as opposed to a lot of folks
generating a lot of ideas that are kind of think tanks, we kind of think of ourselves as a do-tank. We
might not know what we were doing when we got started but they thought it was more important that
we just do. Cameron, I think his mom had a goofy saying, all mouth and no pants.
(Laughter)
But it just kind of stuck with me and I think for desigNYC, a lot of us -- a lot of is just in the
doing. If you have a passion, just start doing. You don't have to know what you want to do. Just
start doing.
And for us, it's always about how do you be collaborative? How do you invite people to learn
together? And we also think that it's important that pro bono is not for free. Pro bono is for the public
good. So in creating an organization that facilitated pro-bono work, we know that we needed to
create a value add for the design community. Why would somebody want to be involved in an
organization like desigNYC? Why would they want to lend their talents and expertise in doing social
impact work? So part of it for us is being community centric and helping people expand their
networks. Helping people to find new outlets that they might not have had for their work to get new
jobs, to make new connections. So we do a lot of community building but we also do a lot of
advocacy both for the projects and for the nonprofits but also for the designers, we try to do a lot of
PR, a lot of storytelling, making of films and movies, and posting case studies on the website or this
was a really scary moment where I was on the Brian layer show.
(Laughter)
But just really quickly wanted to take you through one of our really great projects that just for
2012, a really lovely organization called Educating Tomorrow, it's a young nonprofit that's really
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focused. It's a teachers for teachers organization that are really trying to create wonderful
eco-initiatives within schools. And we matched some of the fantastic design group called the
Language Department and a fantastic kind of development group called Rubenstein technology
group has been developing all the technology aspects of this project.
So sad but true, this is Educating Tomorrow's website as of today. They have not
implemented their new design. But they have a lot of earnest intentions but really struggle with
communicating and presenting themself in a new way because they're a volunteer initiative,
struggling with resources.
So the Language Department did a beautiful job helping them think through their positioning
and how should they talk about themselves and how do you create this position of educators, as
catalysts for change? This their new logo. You can see it's really transformative in terms of what's
going to happen for them. I use this as a case study not because it's a user experience design but
also I think it's an interesting thing to think about in terms of social change and user experience that
we can all spend a lot of time doing all these things in isolation, that this idea of creating collaboration
networks, creating experiences where we can learn from each other and not kind of learn from each
other's mistakes and not everyone has to reinvent the wheel I think is a really interesting model. So I
liked the idea of sharing this project because I think this idea of collaboration networks is something
that hopefully we'll see a lot more of in the future.
Here's just a couple more of their pages. The designers were really creative in terms of it's not
just a business card, it's a brochure and it's perforated so you can rip it off and give it to someone.
This is a group that's all about installing recycling in schools. They wanted something that was really
multipurpose and creative and had a lost legs and resource constraints.
Cool little buttons, T-shirts for kids. Just in the last minute, if this at all is intriguing and
interesting for you, desigNYC is actively searching for its nonprofit partners and design collaborators
for 2012. So if you're interested, go to our website, and there's a "get involved" button and we're
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actively looking for partners. The submission deadline is next Tuesday. So get on it.
(Laughter)
But this is a scene from our most recent party and Mark can contest it's a fun group to be a
part of. So we hope that we can recruit some of you today to get involved and we'd love to see you
as part of the community.
(Applause)
>> KATRIN: I just killed the mic. Putting it into the water glass.
>> MARK: No, a that's not the right one.
(Laughter)
This is the mic.
>> KATRIN: I'm not only the klutzy one clearly today, but I'm also probably the odd one out in
that I actually run a nonprofit and we do implementations in the field. Mobile active is a tiny nonprofit.
We're five people. We're a global network of people all around the world using mobile tech for social
impact. If you are working around the world you'll know a lot of the phones they are not very
sophisticated not nearly as sophisticated as this which poses particular design challenges. So I want
to talk about one of these that I have encountered in the work that I've done. Nothing better than
working for a nonprofit with design challenges. Being in a room with 300 UX/UIs.
(Laughter)
So you can imagine I got so excited I dropped my microphone into the water.
(Laughter)
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So why do I love mobile tech? I love mobile tech because they there are so many of them.
It's the most ubiquitous communication device the world has ever seen. There's 6 billion or so
estimated active subscription activated to be alive at the end of this year. There's only 7 billion
people. So the next slide is actually kind of long. Except that a lot of people have multiple and so we
estimated nobody really knows about 2/3 of the world's population has access to or in possession of
a mobile device. That poses unbelievable opportunities as Mike was alluding to earlier for organizing
for communication delivery and information collection.
Let me play this very short video. You can actually see it as it progresses. And it shows you
the growth -- it's not very nicely designed. It's from a free website. But it shows you where the
growth is happening, which is in developing countries, particularly Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan
Africa, which is where we do a lot of our work.
Phones are getting smarter all around. This is actually an android phone in India. It's a very
cheap, inexpensive android phone. They've become these multimedia devices even though people
have very simple smartphones which also gives us as data collectors, as information delivery service
projects, care, mercy core, all these development organizations are using mobile tech in their work.
In healthcare in all sorts of way.
And certainly you have seen the power of mobile phones in telling stories of the recent
revolutions in the Middle East and that's sort of where I -- we've been around since 2005 when
nobody was talking about this. And I keep saying every year, this is the year of mobile. This is the
year of mobile.
(Laughter)
Finally 2011 was the year of mobile. This is a picture of Cairo where there was a big fire. And
you can see everybody is recording, right? They've become the eyes of the world. But, of course,
after revolutions come elections. And so that's what I want to talk about briefly. It's really posing a
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challenge, a design challenge that we have in using very simple devices for election verification and
election observation. And so I want to tell you a story from Ghana where I worked in 2008 to help
develop a program that was run by an organization called the National Democratic Institute and a
local coalition of election observers to observe the election. It was a very contested election. And
there was a lot of fear that it would go the same way as in Kenya, the year before, that is erupt in
violence and that the person who was in charge, the president, wasn't leaving peacefully. It was a
very, very hot political situation at the time. And you see a picture here of a polling station. These
are election boxes and it makes it feel easy to observe the conduct of an election throughout election
day. I want to show you how it used to be done. So at the end of election day, the information would
be put up on a little piece of paper literally at the polling station often on a pole or something and
written down. This information would be collected and would be transported, etc., and that's still how
it's done in most places. Along the way, lots of things can happen and the end results may not be
exactly how voters intended them. So we worked with local election coalition called Codeo and
there's two lovely volunteers of some 10,000 people who are using their mobile phones to do election
observation at the polling stations. I think the woman's name is Precious if I recall. I don't remember
his name. But they were an incredibly enthusiastic group of people. And then you get something like
this, which is the polling stations. You can see where the design challenges come in, right?
(Laughter)
These are the polling station lists and at each of the polling stations we have two observers.
They have their own phones. They get airtime. And they observe throughout the day using a
checklist like this, challenge number 2, essentially kind of a chart that says things like -- asks things
like, did the polls open on time? Were there enough ballots? Was security present? Were there any
instances? And they check this off and they write this in and they send five times a day like this, this
is a text-message. This is polling station 0150. And you know, something happened there if you go
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back to the sheet, it will actually explain it. And on the back you have people like this kind of main
center processing this data that's coming in via SMS. So if there's 10,000 people reporting five times
a day you get something like 50,000 messages that then get parsed etc. to essentially report on the
conduct of the election. There's also at the end of the day in some instances the actual voting results
get transmitted.
So going back to this slide, there's a lot of errors that can be -- it's not a foolproof method and
design-wise, it's really crappy. So we tried things like this which has been used in mobile data
collection around health, that actually is a little sort of chart, like a little thing that you can then kind of
do the question. This is a health question. You get the question. Then you get something like this
that actually gives you the correct result. Reducing errors by something like 30%. It didn't work so
well. So we don't really have an answer. However, Nigeria had elections, Zimbabwe is having
elections, Egypt is having elections. All these countries are having elections now. And we have
observers at polling stations grappling with something like this. So I pose to you, help us out in this.
(Laughter)
And we have a little bit of stuff we've done with other organizations, done some stuff like
mapping election data in Afghanistan. This was not with observers but this was data that came from
the election commission itself. And so we're trying. We're trying. We really are. Making this -making this interactive, mapping it close to realtime if the political situation allows. But the big
challenge still is happening at the polling stations every day or on election day as we're transmitting
the data.
So if you'd like to help out with this, I would love to talk to you. But it gives you sort of a sense
of -- a real problem, a real design problem that we grapple with that, even though I'm very lucky, I
have a designer on staff, it's not a UI/UX designer at all, and it's this kind of combination of using
low-end technology and the design challenge we grapple with. So thank you very much.
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(Applause)
>> WHITNEY: So going back to a personal story here in a little bit because in 2000, we had a
couple of elections.
(Laughter)
Might remember. And out of that I started on a journey that seems to still be going on. I keep
trying to get out of it and get dragged back in which is to ask the question, can user experience
actually change elections? Given the enormous complexity of them. Now, in 2000 -(Laughter)
You may remember the chads. That election went on for a while. But at the same time there
was another election, the UK international election happened, right at the same time and I happened
to get elected to the board of directors, and they said, you're going to beat head of outreach, and
you're going to go do something about elections.
(Laughter)
Now, I was a little usability person. I did interesting projects, I thought. There was nothing in
my past to prepare me to do something about elections, although I did grow up in New York City.
And I thought that what everybody does on Sundays is a couple hundred thousand of your closest
friends marched down Fifth Avenue.
(Laughter)
So I did grow up in a social -- context of social activism. But there was nothing about that that
made me think that we could actually change elections. So when we looked at the chads, it was
pretty clear that that was a design problem. And we all thought -- did a lot of thinking about how
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many thousands of people you'd have to test to find that error. But the thing that really struck me
was this quote from Theresa LePore who was the Palm Beach County supervisor of elections which
is, she said, "I was just trying to make the text bigger. I know we had a lot of elderly people in my
district, and they needed larger text." That was when I realized how difficult and problematic this was
going to be, because she had one piece of a puzzle, make the text bigger. She didn't have the rest
of the puzzle which is make it designed well. You might ask, why is it that nobody noticed that this
error was going to happen? It's because it's a usability problem. When they checked the ballots,
they checked the cards that went onto the little thing that you -- where you mounted the -- the little
carve-outs you put the punch card under and you punch through the holes. Nobody actually tried to
use it. They just read it. They did a quality check, not a usability check. And everything about how
elections work is a kind of procedural process. It's been going on that way for a lightning time and it's
all about -- long time, and it's all about political parties and procedures that are well enshrined.
There's a lot of procedural validation of the election but there's very little check on does it actually
work for people? Does it actually engage citizens and make them want to vote? When we look
around this country, I went to vote yesterday at the end of the day. I was the 92 nd person. I live in a
tiny town but still 92, 92nd person at my polling station is a pretty pathetic answer. So one of the
questions we have to ask is how do we engage people more?
So in 2002, as a result of what happened in Florida, the Help America Vote Act was passed
and it created a new federal agency called the Election Assistance Commission and I got appointed
to buy on a federal advisory committee, which is pretty cool. We wrote the guidelines for voting
systems in this country. They're called guidelines because the Federal Government doesn't actually
run elections, but in fact, they're a standard. They're a standard in which anybody who wants to sell
a voting machine in this country kind of has to meet in these day. It's been a long and painful
process because that was 2002. We put the person out in 2005. That meant it went into 2007. By
which time we had written a new version.
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(Laughter)
Which is actually in public comment but it will be in public comment for a long time because
right now there are only two commissioners. But there's four commissioner seats and without a
quorum, they can't do anything.
(Laughter).
>> Oh, my God!
>> WHITNEY: All this stuff went on. Another thing that happened was that we started
connecting with regular everyday civil rights organizations like the Brennan Center for Justice which
is at NYU. We did a project called Better Ballots, which is interesting because it -- the political
scientists punched numbers and they look for little odd anomalies. Found a number of elections
where there were errors that can be explained. There were too many mistakes, people who either
showed up at the poll and undervoted, like Sarasota 2006, or showed up and cast too many votes
and invalidated their ballot, and then we went back and we looked at the ballots and said, well, in
hindsight, can we see what the problem was? And it turned out that the problems were things like
really complicated, difficult to understand language, and ballot with weird designs, and strange things
that happened like a candidate was thrown off the election -- the ticket less than a week before the
election after the ballots had been printed and so now they had Wited-out the middle. Very, very
strange things that happened around the whole legal process.
We started looking at them and saying, what could be done? And took those results around
and started talking to election officials. I have to back up a second and say that there was another
project that started also in 2000 in Chicago in response to all of this. The AIG started a project called
Design for Democracy and this took the really ugly ballots, also punch card butterfly ballots, created a
better Stein and then were hired by the Election Assistance Commission to create best practice
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designs. So these two threads of work kind of come together where we can start to say, okay, we've
done some research. They actually researched it. They did pilot tests. They did pilot elections.
They did usability testing. So we're looking at designs that have been pretty well validated. How far
away from that were the ballots that caused problem? And what can we do to change that? And all
of a sudden, I don't think it was just us, but time had come when election officials started to listen to
it. And began to think about what they can do in their own election districts to make a difference.
Now, you might think that we'd really gotten somewhere, but this is the sample ballot in
New York City 2010.
(Laughter)
It's a really stellar piece of design.
(Laughter)
And it had a really interesting piece of -- which is on the back of the ballot the instructions said
that you were to Mark the oval above the name of the candidate you wished to vote for.
>> Oh!
>> Oh, no!
>> WHITNEY: The only saving grace of this is it happened on the back of the ballot in
six-point type so no one actually read it.
(Laughter)
So I don't think anybody voted for DeNapoli thinking they were voting for Schneiderman but
we don't actually know that. In the trying to know something about it, he began to think, what can we
do about this? There are 3,000 some counties in the United States. Elections are locally run. It
means that you have to have an impact in many, many places. So three quick projects that we did.
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First we run flash tests with the Brennan Center on one Saturday afternoon with 12 usability
professionals and bunch of people from Brennan Center got together. We went out to five locations
in four boroughs and is we accosted strangers on the street and asked them if they would stop and
fill in a ballot. And we looked at those ballots to see what kind of errors they were make making and
gave Brennan Center a pile of data for one afternoon. We were able to do something that was kind
of fun, that we knew how to do, that we could organize, and that further -- and took a project out of
the realm of argument and into the realm of let's talk about the data. There was another project that
followed on from there which unfortunately there's a lawsuit that was not settle yet so soon, soon,
soon, I hope to talk about this but not yet.
(Laughter)
The other thing we can do is build communities to support election officials. Brennan -another Brennan Center story, called us up and said, we're working on changing the election law in
Minnesota. You might remember that Minnesota was the site of the other really, really long election
count.
(Laughter)
That was in 2008. That election went on till June. As they recounted absentee ballots. The
problem was when they were returned, they did something wrong on the envelope so those ballots
weren't being counted because people were making clerical mistakes in how they packaged their
ballot to ship it back. Now, if you're absentee, you can't check it. If you're an overseas voter or
military overseas, if you happen to be in Florida on vacation, you shove it in the mail and hope for the
best. And they spent six months, 6 1/2 months, counting those ballots. So seemed like a good thing
to change. And they sent us what is in legal world called a markup. So it's track changes. And
really ugly, really hard to see what you're talking about. And we said, yeah, we'd be happy to work
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on this, but we can't do it if we can't see did. And so we began writing new instructions and doing
new layouts, and to her internal credit Beth Frazer from the Minnesota secretary of state's office did
not say, you guys are crazy, go away. She dove in. We did -- I think I counted up something like 100
iterations, flew back and forth. We a team of people -- had a team of people in Washington State, in
San Francisco, in Boston, few people in Ohio, who helped put this together, and it -- we had plain
language people, and it became the new instructions. But the best thing that happened was that we
did usability tests where we marshal local volunteers to run that test. Beth and her team decided
they wanted a second test, and then they decided that they had learned how to run it themselves,
and they ran that test having learned because we made a kit of materials for them to help them learn.
It was a pretty simple task but it meant all of a sudden election officials began to think, yeah, we can
do this. We don't have to hire expensive professionals. This is something we can do in the course of
our work.
The other thing we can do -- we -- we're doing the same thing in New York State, which is
instead of trying to argue about markup, Davies from Oxide Design created a markup of what the
ballot might look like if we could just change the election laws. And this amazing thing happened on
a phone call with local county election officials. They said, we got to tell you we found this great set
of designs on the web and we think we should be using them. The election commission
commissioned them. We said, yep, and we brought that designer in to work with us.
So all of a sudden, that -- the volunteer work in Chicago led to a big paid project at the national
level, a little bit of volunteer work, releveraged that. So weaving in and out of pro-bono work and
funded work lets us put together a lot bigger.
(Applause).
(Applause)
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This did not make it through last term because it was put in at the end of the session. We're
hoping that it gave people time to get over their shock and this time it will go through, but who
knows?
And we can also remember that we're designing for all voters, not just for voters who
happened to be able to read things on paper, not just for voters who happen to be able to get to the
polls ease I will but access -- easily, but accessibility is part of election design and we have to
remember that voters come in all shapes and sizes so even when we talk about people who are
filling out things on paper, figuring out how high -- how to make places for them to write. That kind
design is also part of elections.
We can all be democracy super heroes. What's been the real lesson of this is it doesn't take a
huge amount of time. It takes being willing to engage with election officials where they are and how
they want to meet us.
So if you want to get in touch, lots of things, I'm now working on this project for ITIF. It's a
funded grant for accessibility voting technologies and I'm proud that in January we're going to open a
challenge to open up the idea of what can we do that's different? How can we use new technology?
How can we use better design to leverage into improving elections for everyone? Thank you.
(Applause)
>> MARK: All right. So now it's time to talk. This is our Twitter hash tag. And how do we get
our Twitter feed up? Oh, there we go. There's the Twitter feed. So how many of you tweet? Okay.
Great. So let's, like -- let's see what we can get out of this.
(Laughter)
We also have microphones. Where are they? There's one there. And there should be
another one somewhere. Anyway, so everybody -- all of our panelists, why don't you all come up
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now and I'm going to sort of weave in and out of some questions, but we really want you guys to
participate too. So I think everybody's up here. And there's our Twitter feed. So great. So how
many of you are interested in doing there -- how many of you are interested in doing this kind of
work? Who's interested in engaging kind of in this sort of social change work? How many of you are
able to do it now? So a few of you are able to do it now. So -- well, great. I think that that's really -- I
always feel like if you really want to get engaged in this kind of work, you kind of have to start with
what your passions are. And I think what our panelists showed is that there's a lot of different entry
points to this. There's kind of the social entrepreneurship entry point that Tyler and Irina talked
about. You can run your own nonprofit like Asi and Katrin were talking about. I think Whitney really
demonstrated what us sort of for-profit designers can do by leveraging a little bit of pro-bono work;
you can get some kind of good, juicy paying work. And that's really the ideal scenario because
ultimately, I believe that in order for us to do this work kind of in a sustainable way, we're going to
have to figure out ways to get paid for it.
So I guess now would be my little spiel to get started. Does anybody -- before I kind of ask
some questions, does anybody have any immediate questions they would like to ask? Or do you see
any great ->> In the middle.
>> MODERATOR: Oh, Tammy, you've got a question.
>> I do not need a microphone.
(Laughter)
That's been established. I just want -- this was unbelievable and motivating.
(Applause)
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Just beyond belief.
(Applause)
And I love Gloria and I think she has raised the bar of UPA beyond belief. And Bloomberg has
amazing vision. I want to just correct one thing that Mark came to me through Michelle -- or to us
through Michelle, and so I want to thank you, Michelle, for that. And I'm just curious, because I know
we talked about a lot of things. I think that I really love the idea of local because so many people -there's the haves and have-nots and in a digital world, we all can get jobs because demand is greater
than -- I mean, there's just so much demand for the kinds of skills in this room, and I think that we all
can give in different ways. And healthcare didn't come up too much. And it's just something I wanted
to talk and ask you about, Michelle, because I feel that there's a lot of people that feel passionate
about healthcare, and the fact that you have people like us that most of us have health insurance and
a lot of people that don't, and it just seems like -- first of all, I think that researchers need to be on that
list, because to Whitney's point and thank you.
(Applause)
If you can't use it, it really doesn't matter.
(Laughter)
Because you're not gonna effect change. So my question is, what's come up around
healthcare? Because I think a lot of us feel strongly about healthcare and wanting to pair our skills -the best way to donate seems to be to donate what you love and do best. And I love that concept.
And where do you see the direction of desigNYC going and what role has healthcare and health care
projects played? That was my question.
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>> MICHELLE: We haven't -- am I on? Ooh, sorry. Hold on. There I am. We haven't had a
lot of healthcare per se projects. There's definitely been some that are really focused on the built
environment for -- as a for instance, there's amazing community development corporations in the city
that provide affordable housing and at love them provide Social Services as part of those
developments. A great organization that we worked with has a complex called Anna Gonzalez
apartments. And a lot of residences are coming out of homelessness, struggling wing HIV -- with HIV
AIDS and the person who runs it has a good job of packaging social services in with the affordable
housing. But the community spaces were really sterile and were completely uninviting. Some of the
problems we did the in first year was could we -- quality of life equals quality of space. So we worked
with both the residence and the service providers to figure out how can you create a better quality of
space that would facilitate healing and facilitate engagement? So I think for us I think it's a huge
opportunity. We are somewhat restricted by the types of nonprofits that come to us, and that we then
kind of connect with design resources. There's some really interesting work that Winter House has
been doing in terms of healthcare, and I would recommend checking out sort of what's been going on
on design observer. They've been doing a lot of the sharing. I think they could use your expertise
and participate in that level.
>> KATRIN: I wish I had done the healthcare project because the same kind of mobile data
collection UNICEF does around healthcare so the same usability challenges apply so you know that
SMS, that text-message in the slide that has all those numbers? Imagine this is patient data. This is
the upper arm circumference of a child that is a telltale sign of malnutrition so that's the value in that
text-message. So I would engage you guys -- I'm amazed this works.
(Laughter)
I would encourage you guys to invite UNICEF next year if you do this again because they
have story upon story upon story of projects that they're doing, particularly around mobile; that's
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obviously my field, in the healthcare arena with humongous design challenges and really poor
design.
>> WHITNEY: I work for NCI in my professional life, and we've been doing a lot of research
in -- for.
(Speaking Spanish)
And one of the things that we found was, especially in LA there are a lot of community health
workers who work in the projects and so having materials that are bilingual at appropriate levels of
medical literacy and appropriate levels of reading literacy and that are free and available to them,
they will use them.
>> MODERATOR: Yeah.
>> Hi there. My name's -- oops.
>> You need a mic?
>> Hi there. I'm Ali Hemming from the hired guns. I don't need ooh mic.
(Laughter)
You guys have been awesomely giving of your time. And I know there's 300 people in the
audience that are champing at the bit to hear how we can help you. So it would be awesome if each
of you guys could kind of go one by one and say, tell us one or two things that each of us could do
that could help your individual projects.
>> MODERATOR: Who wants to go first? Actually ->> WHITNEY: I'll start here.
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>> MODERATOR: Start at the end whether the give me a business card. I'll put you on the
list. When a project comes up, we blast and say who's available. The other thing you can do is sign
up as a poll worker. Participate in elections. Little hardener New York City but if you're in the
surrounding area, go talk to your local county clerk and ask them if they need help with signage. If
they need help with manuals, if they need help with things. They're often quite eager and I think are
getting a little less afraid of pro-bono work.
>> KATRIN: I made my pitch. Let's do this.
(Laughter)
>> MICHELLE: Similar for desigNYC, if you're interested in getting involved in a project is
desigNYC.org, click on get involved, fill out a submission request before next Tuesday. It if it's not
desigNYC, what's your passion? Is it the environment? Is it healthcare? Is it women's issues? Is it
children's issues? Is it education? There are innumerable other connectors. We're certainly not the
only one. If you have passion but don't have time right now, there are a lot of ways to get involved. I
would just say just start doing.
>> ASI: So game for change, it's almost like we're inventing a genre. Like 30, 40 years ago
when people invented documentaries. It's the same thing. So if people in this audience or all of you
would try out those games, would talk about those games, kind of convey the message that there is
this thing and in even be involved in making those games as designers, I think that that would be
great.
>> KATRIN: I have a request. I want to Nokia game designer.
(Laughter)
>> ASI: U.K.
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>> TYLER: We're looking for something that probably a lot of the you can help with, a
database designer that would like to work pro bono.
(Laughter)
And build out a lot of functionality on the site. If you can't do that, then we're looking for
obviously like seed money or people who would like to sponsor Foodstalk or co-brand with us.
>> IRINA: Definitely funding.
(Laughter)
But I think that for First Person American, it's such initial stages right now and we are
constantly looking for participants. So if anyone is interested, please talk to me, email me, send me a
message and let me know if you're interested or you have friends, that would be great. Because
First Person America is not just for immigrants but it's also for children of immigrants or grandchildren
of immigrants who are interested in learning about culture and it's -- my goal for starting First Person
American was never political but it was just telling stories. So I think that if you just can spread the
word, if you can just talk about it and let me know if you want -- if you're interested in being a
participant. That would be great.
>> GLORIA: I want to jump in for just a second and say we ran an event a couple months ago
where a lot of audience members are looking to transition into the industry and it seems to me like
there's a real opportunity here. You have one, two, three, four -- you have six people here who need
help developing mobile apps, who need architecture help, visual design help, who need help with
programming. If you are not getting far in your job search or if you're unhappy in your existing job
and you're looking for a portfolio piece, I think that this is -(Applause).
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(Applause)
There is exactly the kind of folks who can help you transition into your next thing. It helps you,
and it helps them. It helps the people they're trying to help. So I think that this is right here a
fantastic opportunity for some of you people to change your lives if you're looking to make changes,
what usability and civic life would really like a web designer.
(Laughter)
>> KATRIN: Let's not kill ourselves. Nonprofits hire too. We might not offer the same salaries
but I have a designer on staff who works full time who gets a nice salary, nice enough to live in
New York City. Unselfish hiring. I mean, it's not that nonprofits don't also need the design (UNICEF)
and have jobs. We are the employer.
>> MODERATOR: But like Gloria said, this is a great opportunity as an entry point, especially
if this is the kind of work you're interested in doing. Whitney experienced with the voter work that she
did, it did eventually turn into paying work. I think one of the things that I find that's the most
rewarding about this kind of work, especially if you're doing it on the pro bono level is really the
relationships that you develop. Really like everything in life is about relationships. And even having
a relationship with one of these folks up here and working with them to help them solve their
problems, you'll probably develop a great friendship but you'll also be doing some great work that will
also come back to you. So think about it also -- pro bono doesn't just have to mean you're giving it
away. There has to be some kind of quid pro quo. Like Michelle was saying, this idea of a network,
a community, and relationships, developing relationships are really, really valuable and something
that you could really get out of doing this kind of work. Does anybody have any other questions?
>> WHITNEY: Stand up and shout.
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>> My name's Chelsea. I've been a web designer. I've been fortunate enough to work on a
lot of large nonprofit-like sites, United Nations development program, one of my favorites. One thing
I'm really curious and this was something that you talked about a lot is how do you talk about
outcomes for all of this work that's really about design, it's about communication, it's about -- and is a
lot of it too is just digital realm, and it's not necessarily touching people as directly as I would hope for
someone who's like trying to implement social change.
The important thing in that context was how do the outcomes then tie back into developing
more funding, more support, expanding a program and developing further success? Kind of want to
hear from everyone like how do you talk about the outcomes of your work? How do you measure it?
Is it stories? Do you have numbers? What happens once the design work is done?
>> MODERATOR: That's -- especially in this realm of sort of design for social change, that's a
really critical issue, this idea of metrics and measuring outcomes. I think probably, Asi, you and
Katrin probably have a sense of that working from the nonprofit realm. Do you want to speak to that
point from your perspective?
>> ASI: First of all, I feel there is a growing trend to have metrics. It's part because we
become more sophisticated in quantifying the impact, but it's also the funders, that because they are
subsidizing a lot of projects, if they can't get financial return, they want to see return in impact. They
want to see those numbers of how many people they affected, how they affected them, and if it's long
term or short term.
So we have this production in assessment that it's like probably what everybody here is used
to do, kind of -- and there are teams that are helping with that, interviews, focus groups, pretests and
post-tests, but it's also something very interesting that we call embedded assessment. This is
something that is relatively new and the idea is that without talking to the players, you can learn so
much about them because it's a piece of code and it's a software, can you learn so much about
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people just by the way they play the games. And when you have millions of players and you
aggregate this data, you also what they can do better, what features work and what features don't
work. And even what they learn, just by watching their progress.
>> MODERATOR: Actually, Lydia, do we have any good Twitter questions?
>> UH, Hmm.
(Laughter)
Yeah, there's one down at the very bottom. It's right by Tyler's head.
(Laughter)
>> MODERATOR: I wonder how many years in a row -(Laughter)
That one?
>> Sure. Tyler. Can the ballot redesign in the U.S. scale up to world standards like the
African election examples we saw?
>> MODERATOR: Oh. Who wants -- well, Wendy, do you want to -- Whitney, do you want to
answer that one?
>> WHITNEY: We get watched a lot. There are some big international organizations likes the
IFES that promote exchanges among election officials around the world so those connections
already exist. They exist through the U.N.
They exist through all the NGOs and they exist through IFES, but we are beginning to see
projects -- there's a group called Everyone Counts led by the man who used to run IFES. Electronic
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ballot delivery for return. And they've got projects in the U.S. and in Australia. So we're beginning to
see as we move into digital media that it's easier to do projects in more than one country so you
begin to get cross-fertilization that way.
>> MODERATOR: We had a person over here.
>> Eric Parsons. I had a question for Asi, actually. Do you think that violent games impact
their players in a negative way? And second question was has there been any dialogue with the
larger gaming industry, any of the large game publishers? Is there any interest on their side in
changing nature of games?
>> ASI: Well, the first one, the jury's out there. It's out. It's really tough to say there is
research that support the argument that violence is promoting violence in the real world, violence in
games and there are definitely people that believe that actually it's like releasing your violence while
you're playing the -- in the virtual world and actually you don't do it in -- otherwise.
To me what I don't like about it's very shallow. It's not meaningful. It's not meaningful as any
other media. You read a book, there's something that you deal with. And here it's like you just shoot
another one, another one, another one. Commercial industry we're trying very hard. Not so
successful. Until now it's tough. They're not that social responsible and they want to make money
and fast. That's basically it.
(Laughter)
>> MODERATOR: Actually, there's a question over here.
>> I don't need a mic. Actually, a comment and a question. The first comment is I think the
one great thing was sort of how can we help you. I also want to just encourage everybody here in
your organizations, I'm sure some of you are freelance but some of you work in actually large
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corporations. Large corporations have time and money to invest, and I challenge all of you to go
back to your companies and whichever one of these folks or one or more of them that really
impressed you tonight, talk in your companies about that, because there's money there, and there's
sponsorship and resources there. And I just want to make sure you avail yourself. And I will speak
personally and say that in my -- I just started a new company where local charities are one thing we
want to support. So any one of yours, I'm absolutely gonna look at finding a way to get my company
involved with supporting you guys. And I would just encourage you all to do the same thing.
My question is, and this kind of an interesting thing, because -- and I think Asi, it's the Games
for Change that got me thinking about there. When they talk about climate change, like my kids, I will
tell you right now, my kids can give you chapter and verse on why reuse recycle, that's all really
good. When you think about games to change sort of playing and everything, our children get it.
Right? When they become adults, they don't do anything about it. So I guess the question I have for
you is -- and again, because we all know what's right about food. We all know what's right about
respecting immigrants, all of these various projects, but do you guys find challenges -- and I'll throw it
out to anybody who's got -- maybe has faced that but how do you make this happen at the level of
adults? Because I think that what -(Laughter)
Honestly, I think that everybody here goes, oh, my God, of course, of course, of course, of
course, but actually making it happen like -- I look at Foodstalk, I love that idea of local grown food,
but I can look -- and, again, with respect, all the websites in the world I go on about what that means,
but I talk to my colleague about buying Fijian water and knowing a client of mine quit Fijian water
because they don't have clean Fijian water.
>> MODERATOR: Who wants to take that?
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(Laughter)
I know what you mean. I think it's really -- it is a challenge because as we get older we get
much more cynical and jaded especially us New Yorkers.
(Laughter)
>> KATRIN: Are you doing all the hard questions, like impact. How do we actually change
behavior? I think this is why we do the work that we do is to figure out exactly these questions. And I
don't think they're easy answers. What motivates a person to change behavior or to vote or to -- as a
nation conduct a peaceful election or to be engaged in other sort of democratic participation of any
sort. I think there's a real deep understanding of human motivations, incentives, of what makes a
person do what they do. And so one of the things that we do a lot is we sit and we observe and we
listen and good usability people know how to do this, right? You know what a person does and often
why and that is sort of the starting point of where -- okay, then you go to the next step. Do we
succeed? No. Do we fail all the time? Yes. In fact, I run an event called fail fail. We talk about all
the projects that we bonked. Social change and social change in particular, it's failure. But I think
also you asking exactly the hard questions, I don't think there's any easy answers to it. I'm sure.
>> MODERATOR: We only have time for one more question.
>> SVETLANA: Hello. My name is Svetlana, and I have a comment and a question. For me
usability is also interchangeable with accessibility because I am one of 37 million people with hearing
loss in the United States and hundreds of millions around the world. People with disabilities make
the largest minority group, and yet they are the most ignored. I work as a web professional and feel
frustrated not only trying to make websites accessible for people with disabilities, but also even for
myself as a deaf professional trying to interact with those with normal hearing.
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98% of websites are not accessible. For people like myself it's videos that are not captioned
and podcasts that are not transcribed. Captioning is beneficial not just for those with hearing loss but
for everyone, including people speaking foreign languages.
When listening to Irina's presentation, I can relate to this as a Russian-born person moving
here and I had to first learn English and become fluent and, on top of this, to deal with barriers to
communication and information access as a deaf person. Also being from Russia, accessibility there
is not as great as it is here in the States.
I'm very grateful to Gloria for providing captioning services for me at the UPA events;
otherwise I would not have been here. And I also appreciate Whitney mentioning in her presentation
about accessibility for people with disabilities at elections. And my question is for you about whether
you have worked or considered projects to improve accessibility for people with disabilities?
>> WHITNEY: Maybe I can jump in because in 2003 when started working on the federal
committee, I thought accessibility was a good thing and we should all do it and it really wasn't that big
a deal until I heard people saying things like, well, why should they be able to keep me from having
the kind of election I want? And the battle that erupted between disability advocates and the
antiblack box voting people. It's something that we still haven't resolved, I think, to this day. But I
really think that if you don't start by thinking about what you're doing as accessible from the very
beginning, it's almost impossible to add on. Clayton Lewis has the favorite peanut butter close that
its usability cannot be smeared on the surface like peanut butter.
Accessibility can even less. Iso has made this big move in readjusting their standards. They
brought the accessibility standards into the usability series and have defined accessibility at the iso
level as usability for a broader range of people. And I think it really sort of changed my life to the
point that I'm running a project that's devoted entirely to exploring accessible voting technology. It's
certainly not where I thought I would be going.
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>> KATRIN: From a nonprofit perspective and maybe to wrap it up, honestly, I would say I
can't afford it, right? I'd love it make videos that we produce etc. that -- caption them, etc.
>> WHITNEY: Do you script your videos?
>> KATRIN: We often don't, right? We do, but actually when we do stuff in the field, we then
don't necessarily caption it. And so I have started to collect some sort of resources around it so
there's dotSUB, right? Can we put it up on there and have other people caption this in other
languages. I think there's a lot of sort of free and crowd source and affordable kinds of solutions out
there, but I stumble upon them just by happenstance. So I think one super useful thing would be to
advocate these, if I want to do this, make it more accessible, how do I do that without breaking the
bank? DotSUB, this is brilliant. Yeah. So what else is there? So I have the list. Like, here's the
manual, how to make stuff accessible in various ways or multilingual. There's another challenge.
Full of challenges.
>> MODERATOR: All right. I think that we're going to have to wrap it up. Gloria has some
closing words.
>> GLORIA: Closing announcements, yes. I think first we should definitely give you guys a
round of applause.
(Applause)
Thank you for a fantastic moderation of such a great panel and thank you for each of the
panelists who have these amazing stories. And I think that hopefully this will lead to something
snowballing. If even one good thing comes out of this, this whole thing was worth it. I'm really glad
to everyone who's here tonight. And you now have before you courtesy of Bloomberg, another hour
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of socializing. They've got more food and drink out there for you so you can stick around for a little
while. And take advantage of their hospitality.
So I'm going to wrap this up here. We have -- yes, yeah, I got all that. Oh, you might want to
show me where I push the button. Which button? There's a lot of buttons here. I might blow
something up here.
(Laughter)
Oh, that one. Ooh.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Here we go. Thank you to Bloomberg. Thank you, Mark.
(Laughter)
All right. So actually, how many people are hiring out there in the audience? All right. Good.
Hope knee, we got enough. Antoinette, my assistant, she's holding something up right now. We
didn't do balloons. Tonight we went crazy. We're doing flags.
(Laughter)
>> Woo-hoo.
>> GLORIA: We got about 35 flags there. The yellow one is the prototype. Made it last night
just to make sure it could be done. But the orange ones are for the general crowd. The green ones
are for the Bloomberg folks because you guys get some separate branding in honor of the occasion,
yes.
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(Applause)
I knew you guys liked green. Oh, yeah. I'm gonna keep going. Ooh. Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes.
(Applause)
The other thank you goes to our fantastic team at Sachs Insights. That would be Tammy.
>> Shannon and Lydia.
>> GLORIA: Shannon and Lydia.
(Applause)
They really helped pull this all together. And one more time, oh, yeah, here we go. Oh, yeah,
how many volunteers do we have in the audience? All right.
(Applause)
These are the folks who are doing this, make it all possible. Thank you for the NYC UPA
volunteers their names are on the have programs. What I would like to do is when you get up to go
to the cocktail area, be sure and pick up a flag if you're one of the hirers and then people, if you are
interested in speaking with people who are hiring, you should be able to see them. We don't have to
gather you all into a corner like cattle like we did last time. So from Bloomberg, though, in particular,
let's go back here for a second. Well, I just blew that didn't I? Bloomberg. Where's Elaine. There
you are, Elaine's holding the green flags and she also ran the New York marathon this weekend.
(Cheers & Applause)
Yes, yes. Thank you so much. And Anne Glennon who's by the door, massive with the
contracts and all the paperwork and all the everything. Helped us.
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(Applause)
And we got Ed in the booth. He's over there. Yes. You don't see him but he makes a lot of
stuff happen actually. You can stay in touch with each other obviously through our social media
challenges like LinkedIn and Facebook. We also offer if you are a member which I guess everybody
in here is now, we have the website allows you to create a member profile page. So you can put a
link to your portfolio site if you have it, whatever. You can stay in touch with each other. Let's see.
Job postings will come out in email tomorrow. Anybody that submitted any of those. So again, back
in my -- getting back into my order of things, I want to thank the panelists, Sachs Insights, the
volunteers. I mainly want to thank you guys for coming here tonight, and we will see you again in
January. Have a great evening, everyone. Thank you so much.
(Applause)
(Cheers)
(Concludes at 9:02 p.m.)
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