Speakers
Kevin Hoffman
Workshop Better Meetings By Design
Brilliant ideas go nowhere without the full engagement and trust of everyone involved. Whether you’re part of the team, you lead the team, you lead the department, or you lead the company, you’ve got to sell those concepts to push them into reality. The environment where they are sold is the business meeting.
In a half-day workshop, Kevin M. Hoffman (Experience Director, Happy Cog) will lead you through how the team at Happy Cog applies design thinking, participatory decision making models, and unorthodox experiences to make meetings better. Happy Cog successfully explores, communicates, and executes web site & application design with a diverse range of companies and corporate cultures. Whether it’s establishing early concepts, getting back on course, building buy-in, or thinking about the larger process, these approaches can be applied quickly and can lead to a increased understanding and engagement throughout any project.
Topics Covered:
- Meeting Roles
- Facilitation Basics and Advanced Ideas
- Meeting Process and The Role of Meetings in Projects
- Tools and Tricks for Fun, Efficient Meetings
Bio
Prior to joining Happy Cog, Kevin M. Hoffman had spent more than a decade building websites, developing online strategies, and leading projects for colleges and universities in Baltimore, MD. He has been a consistent voice for intelligent communication strategies and an expert consensus builder in environments where vastly differing, passionate opinions were the norm. Kevin speaks frequently at conferences like SXSW, the IASummit, UX London, and the UIE Web App Masters tour, and writes occasionally at A List Apart and Happy Cog’s blog, Cognition.
As an adjunct faculty member at both the University of Baltimore and MICA, Kevin brought standards-based approaches to web design and front-end development courses, whose syllabi and materials were largely in the dark ages of table-based design. He has developed courses that evangelize best practices to a new generation of designers and developers. In his spare time, Kevin has developed web solutions for non-profits, public libraries, indie record labels, car customizers, and his own part-time karaoke business. With his team at Happy Cog, he hosts the massively overattended Cog’aoke competitions at SXSW.