Interaction Latin America (ILA) congress 2023 >

ILA23 is seeking voices that represent and nurture interaction design in Latin America, with 250 talks from different countries and four thematic axes: “Disconnect to reconnect”, “New ways to experience the digital world”, “Diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion” and “Professionalizing experience design”. Check out my report based on why experiences at the congress.

After Years of online congresses the ILA 2023 was my first event in presence since the beginning of COVID. My expectations were very high and I was very impressed of the level of organization and some of the talks. Of course There is always a preference for certain talks and also I did not attend to all of the talks since some of them were held in parallel.Also I participated at a workshop which did not allow me to participate at talks same time.

Opening Keynote by Dave Malouf: “Return to Office” and the world we live in today”

In this talk, Dave explained “ […”] the issues involved in the debate regarding whether or not it is best for people to be forced to work in an office environment or not, why decision makers might lean in one direction vs. another, and why anyone who is forcing people to work in an office with rigid rules is just plain wrong.”
Considering Dave’s knowledge and expertise about DesignOPS (he coined the term and also wrote the essential books “DesignOps Handbook” and “What is Design Ops?” ) the talk was sort of generic and boring. Yes, everything he said about working remotely is true and not so many talked about before but maybe because most was quite obvious as for example once you learned to work remotely you might not understand why you have to return to an office, Don’t get me wrong: I do think it matters to be conscious about how COVID impacted our life/work balance but from someone as Dave I expected way more.

Workshop by Mariana Salgado and Eduardo Mercovich: “Tools to understand and design the world we want”

I know Eduardo for many years since his very beginning at Mercado Libre and Mariana from her podcasts “diseño y diáspora” so I was happy when both invited me to their workshop. I found myself within a very diverse group of latinamerican designers all looking for the same objective: “[…] How can we (as a community of designers) contribute to create the world we want, and from there, in turn create community. […]”.

Based on different methods the group was able to co-create ideas about the utopia of changing the world. I liked the workshop since it was unconventional and fulfilled what I expect from a congress-workshop: something you can not read about or watch in a video. Too many times I experienced a “technical tutorial” about design systems or use of AI live on stage.

Let’s talk about sponsors. Yes, they are needed and a congress would not be the same without them, it would be probably a poorer experience. Still, there are some unwritten laws as not tagging a talk from a sponsor since oftentimes sponsors want to represent themselves a little bit more contextual then just paying for being places on a banner or being mentioned on stage.ILA 2023 did not tag talks from sponsors and that was a mistake.

Designing the interface of a Digital Census by Daniel Mordecki

Daniel is an old friend of mine which could makes it difficult for me to talk about. But it does not. Besides his unique entertaining way of giving a talk he gave some real insights about a use case which is uncommon. A governmental project dealing about the digital census in Uruguay and indirect also about the same use case in Argentina. He shared his experience highlighting the importance of usability when it comes to a digital census. Usability is a topic with more then 30 years of history but when bringing it into a governmental context it is always interesting. The last time I heard a public talk about user experience when it comes to governmental projects was the world famous case of uk.gov but Daniel stood in no way behind when explaining in detail how missing usability could impact a census,

I feel! I am! by Andres Rodriguez

He is a professor and researcher at the Faculty of Informatics at the National University of La Plata (UNLP). His talk was about the ideation and sketching of haptic interactions. Bringing academic projects to a congress is always risky: people would complain about missing context to work environments or would just get bored when conflicted with too many scientific details. During his talk Andres entertained and mastered in how to bring an academic topic to a highly professional audience. He gave context about why technology knowledge still matters when it comes to HCI. Even the term HCI is so uncommon but yet so necessary in today's design events especially when talking about user experience.

“MVPs in the real world” by Everett McKay

A very inspiring talk about a topic which is not new but still polemic. Everett was able to bring the discussion about what is a MVP in the real world back to life, based on his experiences. Although I do not agree in all his points about what is the “real world” it made once again very clear not only how necessary MVPs are but also how dangerous when applied wrong. I will follow up the topic since it is so relevant in day to day business.

UX: Behind the glamor by Facundo Ruiz

Another sponsor talk but this time quite well approached. Facundo gave an insight view as design director to his environment of Mercado Libre in a way which is rarely seen. Besides highlighting the high level of design at Mercado Libre -taking into account that this is probably the highest level of UX/ Product Design at scale in LATAM- he also talked about all the mistakes and challenges at the company. This was inspiring and very interesting to follow since it gave insights that you can not read about so easily and showed the self confidence of a design leader by talking about his and company’s weaknesses.

Tune in and Design your Research! Exploring the Podcast as a Creative Tool by Mariana Salgado

There are a lot of design podcasts out there but the one from Mariana is special because of two reasons: 1. it is held in Spanish which is unusual especially when considering that she is Norwegian and 2. she offers untypical design topics or brings new and unheard contexts to design. Her democratic approach when choosing topics shows once again what user centricity could also mean: design related content chosen by designers and then executed as a podcast by designers. Her use case is unique and she is very entertaining,

What Design can do? by Kees Dorst

The last keynote by the dutch designer and educator Kees Dorst was my highlight since it dealt with two of my favorite and most polemic design topics: Design thinking and framing within a design thinking process. There was a lot said about Design thinking and thanks to Kees he did not gave another introduction about how to design think but gave a very interesting talk about how to apply framing into a design thinking process and how this actually changes the output. Based on use case from the city of Sidney, in which worked as a consult, he was able to underline the importance of how to frame a challenge. The documentation of this use case can be found in his amazing book “Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking by Design”

My key take aways

The congress was very well executed and brought some topics and speakers to light which were sort of unexpected. Most important I experienced once again what made me feel missing in person congresses since the pandemic: the social interaction between designers. We are so used to to WhatsApp, LinkedIn and all the other social media channels and yet our interaction should not be reduced to that.