Olishaw

Bio

Oli Shaw is a strategic design consultant, who is experienced in creative direction and service design. While his past is in global digital advertising for brands such as: Panasonic and Adidas, during the last 4 years he has focused on product and service innovation for clients such as: Nokia, BSkyB, Orange, Tesco, UBS. He has lead the branding and design for a range of projects including: publishing systems, home energy monitoring products and music streaming services.

As a consultant he creates frameworks and processes within organisations to initiate or aid internal innovation. His approach is highly collaborative and participatory, he plans and facilitates workshops / open design sessions within organisations. He is employed to set up (creative) agile processes for tactical delivery of products, and has built or grown cross discipline teams needed to make this happen.

In addition to his professional work he runs workshops and speaks at conferences across Europe on topics ranging from; discovery & recommendation, personalization, serendipity, creativity, brand strategy and rapid innovation techniques.

Speaking / Workshops

Ambient personalisation (The interface of you)

London, March 2013, MEX 2013

"In a single day we create extensive footprints of data as a result of the digital services and products we use. There's the points we earn on store loyalty cards, the way we interact with Facebook and our activity in google products for starters. Plus we can also self-track almost everything from sleep, exercise to mood. These data sets prove valuable in making the services we use more personalised but taking that idea further, we can now surely start to predict actions to make things even more relevant to our desires. We will be exploring the possibilities of these prediction based behaviours and looking at how we could benefit from a truly personalised interface"

Rapid product invention for a data driven service [Workshop]

London, October 2012, UXpeople

London, November 2012, UCD2012

In this workshop we will cover the concept of serendipity and how it can be leverage by using 'big data'. Then, as a way of better understanding and remembering the principals of serendipity, you will have to complete a design challenge: Create a new product or service using some rapid invention techniques (which are shared & explained in the workshop). To spice things up there will be a number of 'seed' problems which you can use to create your serendipitous product from. Some safe and familiar, but some much more adventurous, which bridging into the realms of the near future (sci-fi).

Take aways from this workshop:

• Familiarity with Serendipity in a digital arena
• Product & service innovation / invention techniques
• Rapid ideation methods
• Understanding of how to integrate serendipity into your work

Serendipity for products and services (from big data)

London, October 2012, IXDA

A talk on data driven serendipity for products and services, with a rapid product invention activity.
"His talk will show how we can include the possibility of designing systems that create opportunities for users to have experiences they might perceive as unexpected, insightful and/or valuable (and therefore potentially as serendipitous). Followed by a collaborative design activity on product invention for data driven discovery."

Lazy perceptions &The value of experiencing

London, June 2012, SCAMP 2012

"In this talk the audience are experimented on and given activities to complete. We will take a journey together exploring:

• - How our perceptions are quickly formed from our assumptions
• - How our biases (like confirmation bias) can blinker us in favour of efficiency.

The session is concluded by exploring what it means to experience something without being burdened with the need to remember it (or capture it on their camera)."

Better inspiration through serendipity and the unexpected

Belfast, March 2012, CreativeCamp

A talk about how to improve your creativity and inspiration by opening yourself up to some serendipity and adding randomness into your life.

Serendipity & Data: Recommendations and Discovery

London, November 2011, LondonIA

Prague, October 2011, IA Europe

Serendipity is a catchy term, there is a lot of hope placed in how we can better show relevance in an abundance of information, there's also a lot of myths about what a serendipitous system can do and should do. This talk explores the different areas serendipity can be applied from; search results, what is around me (location based suggestions) and suggesting things which aren't being looked for. Looking at the positive aspects of creating relevance in a world of information overload but also the pitfalls and problems that come with recommendations and serendipity.

Creature Cutification workshop

London, July 2011, Interesting '11

A workshop to cater for 200 creative to make a creature and cuitfy it using plasticine and their imaginations, once the creature had be sculpted and decorated there was a photobooth area to document it.

Magic, hurt feeling and forgiveness (Magitek)

Lisbon, May 2011, UXLX

We live in modern times, witchcraft has been replaced by technologically magical products and service whose appearance is as alluring as our expectations of how we can use them. The more utopian the products and service we use become the less we need to understand how they work, which is fine, until something goes wrong and you need to get it working again. This talk will be examine the pitfalls of simplified 'seamless' designs, how something which was perceived as magical one day can be the source of great frustration then next, when things are no longer working as expected or worse completely broken. In a world of immaculately created artefacts be it on-screen or in-hand, the role of perception is intrinsically linked to emotion as an effective design approach, yet often overlooked.

Future foods: Both real and imagined

Brighton Science week, March 2011, Pecha Kucha

A talk on 'Future foods' which explores the glimpses of food from the future in sci-fi films, contrasted with the reality of what is around and available to use today.

Commuter Game Design

Febuary 2010

A (lite) study into commuters playing (iPhone) games and some of the design principals that can be extracted from the research, looking at the behaviors and traits that are associated with mobile game players in a commuting scenario.

Catching Sleepers

Sheffield, November 2010, InterestingNorth

The art & game of 'catching sleepers' - Those public transport passengers who fall asleep whilst journeying on buses, trains, tubes and alike. What started off as a passing amusement during my daily commute to and from work, quickly became a more serious fascination, trying to understand why these people would sleep in such a public place? Before long my fascination had developed into a year long lite-anthropological study on the behaviour of 'sleepers'. Through this study I have been looking at identifying the traits, behaviours and patterns of sleepers, what similarities could be found in the type of person that makes a 'sleeper'? The pros & cons of different sleeping methods and tactics. Through the documentation of this study I've developed a simple game for continued entertainment in which others can competitively play the game of 'Catching sleepers' too.