CanUX + IxDA Meetup #1

CanUX is delighted to partner with IxDA Ottawa to bring you periodic in-person meetups in Ottawa. Our first meetup will take place in the beautiful RBC Foundry space at Bayview Yards on Thursday, March 13, 2025, starting at 6pm. Even though it’s a school night, don’t miss the change to mingle with Ottawa’s experience design and service design community. For directions to the venue and transportation options, check out the Getting There section futher down on this page of this page.

Light refreshments (coffee/tea/water/soft drinks) will be provided. We recommend having dinner ahead if you plan on staying for the entire 2.5 hour duration of the event.

CANUX+IxDA Meetup Schedule

The evening’s schedule and the speaker availability is subject to change in the event of flight delays or last minute cancellations.

CANUX+IxDA Tickets

Tickets are CDN$10+tax and can be purchased online directly on online through Eventbrite. Tickets are non-refundable. If the
tickets sell out, a waiting list will be provided. All proceeds go towards future CanUX + IxDA meetups.

Getting there 

Bayview Yards is located at 7 Bayview Station Rd, Ottawa, ON K1Y 2C5 (see location in Google Maps) and is walking distance from Bayview Station, one of Ottawa’s largest transportation nodes, conveniently positioned to walk, cycle, take public transportation or drive to.

Cycling: Located beside the Ottawa River Pathway and many other routes, Bayview Yards is easily accessible via bicycle. We offer ample bike racks, at the front and back of our building, throughout all seasons.
Public Transit: Bayview Yards is located 500m away from Bayview Station, an O-Train hub that also serves multiple bus routes.
Driving: Bayview Yards offers free on-site parking in the gravel lot immediately to the right of building. In addition there are 50 spaces along Bayview Station Road offering 2 hours free parking, and 27 spaces along Stonehurst and Burnside offering 1HR free parking.

SPONSOR OUR CANUX+IxDA MEETUPS

Sponsorship of our meetups is available for CDN$100 and includes a mention by the emcee, your logo on the revolving slides prior to and after the presentation, and listing on this event page online. You can purchase the sponsorship directly via interac eTransfer to info AT canux DOT io and we will send you an invoice. Sponsors of the upcoming and the last edition of the CanUX conference receive an additional 25% off CanUX+IxDA meetup sponsorship costs.

SESSION INFORMATION: 

DECOMMODITIZING DESIGN 

In this talk, Cornelius will examine the situation that led to the unprecedented current wave of layoffs, and how company PR departments are using the guise of an economic downturn and the cult of AI to offload bad investment bets through significant downsizing. We’ll look at what led to the commoditization of design (and commoditization of designers), and consider a couple of humorous examples that illustrate those concepts.

Subsequently, we’ll unpack the root causes of why (UX) research and design departments are some of the more affected disciplines across the board, and examine the many ways designers have ‘designed themselves out’ of the production cycle, including:
  – focusing on assembling decontextualized, templated front end-components and rapid prototyping at the expense of the required rigour and depth of research and design work
  – focusing on primary product personas while ignoring the effects of our designs on entire secondary and tertiary user populations
  – exclusively using short, time-boxed bursts of work that align with various development methodologies at the expense of well thought out discovery and contextualization efforts
  – ignoring building up knowledge and vocabulary that connects the dots between design outcomes and high-profile corporate initiatives
  – convincing leadership that it’s acceptable for other disciplines to do research work with minimal or no research training
  – establishing design education programs that focus primarily on technical skills while most of the hiring today is done by immature in-house product teams
  – becoming early adopters and evangelists for immature experience paradigms that contribute to societal anxiety and depression

We’ll then shift our focus to positivity, examining the attributes of research and design skillsets that have not been nearly as affected by layoffs, and how these skills map onto foundational / generative types of research, and higher orders of design like service and systemic design.
We’ll also look at the types of problem solving and thinking (futures thinking and systems thinking vs design thinking and visual thinking) that are applicable to them, as well as the types of markets and industries that are more stable and more conducing to meaningful, sustainable design careers, immune to the frequent yo-yoing of the tech cycles of the 21st century.

Speaker Bio: CORNELIUS RACHIERU

Cornelius is the Founder and Managing Director of Canadian systemic service design consultancy Ampli2de Inc., where he explores his fascination with the politics of design while leading service and system-scale enterprise experience design projects.

Over the past 20 years, he has managed a number of large UX and service design teams as practice leader at Deloitte Canada and Shaw Communications, and has consulted in a wide range of industries, from technology to financial services, healthcare, enterprise risk management, autonomous transportation, intellectual property and law. He has also guest lectured at University of Barcelona/BTS, SCAD Hong Kong and is a workshop instructor for Rosenfeld Media.

Cornelius the Founder, Chair and Creative Director of the popular CanUX conference, Canada’s largest and longest running annual UX event. A self-proclaimed night owl (he is originally from Transylvania), he loves red eye flights and is a nomad at heart.

*Image credit: Bayview Yards and CanUX