Arts, Humanities & Innovation – Speaker Series: Designing for good

As part of the Arts, Humanities and Innovation – Connecting with Industry series, Leon Butler, research fellow on the TechInnovate program at NUI Galway, will talk about design, and how PhD students might user their research skills in industry once they qualify.

This series of talks is aimed at researchers from the Arts & Humanities, and will be of particular interest to PhD students considering options for future career development.

Talk overview

Leon will talk about the importance of research in the design process. Design is no longer limited to visual designers with a flair for creativity but open to all who wish to engage in the process to understand the user and to address how we design for their needs. Human Centred Design focuses on serving rather than selling the product or service, to achieve this you must empathise with the user and define their needs to create a rounded User Experience (UX). These type of UX projects are generally broken in to five planes, most of which are not visible to the end user but provide a conceptual framework for talking about UX problems and the tools we use to solve them. Leon will discuss this conceptual framework for UX projects and present a Human Centred Design approach to solving them.

Leon’s Bio

Leon has worked across a broad range of positions in the media industry as a visual narrative designer, filmmaker, and educator. Since setting up his practice, he has also worked with clients as diverse as Starbucks on their global holiday campaign, Druid Theatre on promotional film for their iconic productions to musician Macklemore, who commissioned Leon to document their 2014 visit to Dublin’s o2 for two sold out shows. He has also developed many personal projects in animation, typography, children’s illustration and documentary. His research interest areas include adaptive interactions and experiences using available data in the public sphere and generative typography and in 2015 he completed a residency at the School of Visual Arts in New York in this field. In 2016, Leon received a ‘Certificate of Typographic Excellence’ from the Type Directors Club in New York. The Design and Craft Council of Ireland listed Leon as one of their ‘Future Makers’ for 2016 and completed a three month residency in Los Angeles with digital agency 72andSunny. Leon is currently a research fellow on the Techinnovate program at NUI Galway.