Atomic Object hosted a second Agile UX Retreat in Grand Rapids, Michigan over the weekend of July 10-11, 2010. The first retreat was hosted earlier this year by Cooper in San Francisco. The group was initially brought together by Anders Ramsay and Lane Halley to focus on creating a new blend of user experience (UX) practices and agile software development practices.
I’ll happily admit to having more than one “pinch me” moments over the weekend as I looked around the room at the thought leaders represented in the participants who’d come to Grand Rapids from all across the country. [Side note: in our experience with bringing software professionals from major metropolises to Grand Rapids, the near universal response is compliments and utter surprise on how much GR has going on and how attractive a city it is. If GR was a company, it would desperately need a marketing strategy.] I haven’t had my brain stretched this much for some time. On the other hand, I don’t know what else I should have expected considering the talent and personalities in the room, the fact that we represented distinct disciplines each with its own history, terminology, and perspective, and the incredibly ambitious nature of the work we’re doing. Potentially so ambitious, in fact, that the idea that what we were really discussing was a post-industrial approach to collaborative, interdisciplinary, creative team work was given serious debate.
The group of twenty participants included developers, designers, testers, researchers, company owners, consultants, and employees. Approximately half of us had participated in the first retreat, and half of us were new to the group. I felt we had a great balance between new and old, and a useful diversity of experience and opinion. The spirit of mutual respect and collaboration was both remarkable and productive. The group self-organized, with a few people naturally and effectively facilitating as necessary. The Factory in downtown Grand Rapids provided a great physical space for our work.
The majority of our time (at least if you don’t count dining and drinking at San Chez Bistro on Saturday night) was spent on two initiatives. The first was to craft a statement of values. The second was to organize and summarize a list of brainstormed problems we’ve all experienced. We concluded the retreat with a plan for continuing the work we started, and a strong desire to meet again soon and push this important effort forward.
9 Comments
Carl,
Great to hear about these event’s in GR, we would love to be involved in any future UX Retreat’s you might have.
Joe
Thanks for this great summary! I am really excited to see that there is some emergent momentum following the retreat at Cooper in SF. Other events are now being planned or discussed in London and NYC and elsewhere. It is somewhat ironic that I was not able to attend this retreat, since I spent much of my childhood in Michigan.
Congrats AO! What a great think tank to host in GR. I was involved in the recent IDSA Mid-East conference held in GR which drew designers from all over the midwest and they were similarly impressed with the city and creative teams growing here. Please consider me interested in future retreats!
sounds like a great productive event. I was wondering if/when the 2 initiatives are going to be made public? I’m really curious.
– dave
Thanks for the blog post! With the London retreat happening next weekend, I’m really excited that what we started in SF is manifesting.
Dave – we have a series of insights we’re planning on sharing through Spin the next few weeks. The perspectives of the AO people who participated are interesting in their diversity.
I believe a plan is being worked on to continue the development of the artifacts I reference, though I’m not sure on the details or timing of that plan.
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