Darren Menachemson, Director of Design at the Australian Customs Service, spoke on Design Visualisations.
To recap from the meeting invite:
Design Visualisations are information products that turn design concepts into highly visual narratives early in a project lifecycle. Design Visualisations enable decision-makers, stakeholders, users and the project team to understand, challenge and refine complex solutions-to-be.
I found Visualisations to be a good reframe of the traditional collaborative design workshop. Darren has worked out a way to make them really sing - and just as exciting, appeal to senior managers in a way that shows clear benefit (and if this doesn’t impress you, nothing will). He uses graphical representations and plain language description (personas, high level needs statements, stepped processes, user impact lenses) to pitch the likely upsides (and down) of the future solution, so that the senior business stakeholders understand exactly what they are getting for their development dollar. I learnt a lot of valuable stuff - Darren’s presentation helped to put a couple of sticky design process design issues (what a mouthful!) into perspective for me - things that have been troubling me around UCD involvement for a major program of work.
I’ve asked Darren to pitch a proposal toward Oz-IA/2008 when submissions open - I think that an expanded version of tonight’s talk would be a very exciting thing for this year’s conference.
We had Malaysian food at Rasa Sayang afterwards, and let me tell you, it was bloody amazing 
Beef Rendang, Prawn Sambal, Lamb Curry, a sambal stirr-fry of little dried fishies (Ikan Belis), Kung Po chicken, Chili Fried Green Prawns, Spinach in garlic, Duck in crab meat sauce, and Nasi Goreng.
For dessert, I had Ice Kachang, Donna had Chendol. Other folk had the avocado whipped with Baileys Irish Cream dessert. And some ordered a sago thing, can’t remember the name, but the rate it was being consumed let me to believe that it was pretty good.
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