Carbon Five and Hot Studio at Web 2.0 Expo in April

Maria Giudice from Hot Studio and I have organized a panel called Can’t We Just All Get Along? Human-centered Design Meets Agile Development for Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this coming April.

How can designers and developers work together in a process that seems to be contradictory in nature — and how does visual design fit into the picture? How can we best create integration, collaboration and implementation around seemingly divergent methodologies and languages?

Human-centered design — basing its insights on thoughtful user research, iterating early through documentation, and beginning development much later in the process once the design has been fully fleshed out — has become the de-facto process and approach for the creation of useful and desirable products. At the same time, Agile Development — promoting developing early and often in short iteration cycles with tight feedback loops — has become the standard for developing useful software.

Our panel is moderated by Maria Giudice of Hot Studio and consists of designers, developers and clients. We will discuss how the two processes can co-exist, complement and thrive within certain rules and conditions. Our session will describe and explore the differences between the two approaches, when it’s appropriate to use agile development, how to integrate this popular method into the human-centered design and research process — and why client needs and today’s marketplace increasingly are demanding these collaborative techniques.

This session is scheduled for 11:00am Thursday, April 2, 2009. I’ll be the agile developer on the panel.

We’ll be running a similar session at South by Southwest in Austin in March. Details coming soon.