Registration is open for the inaugural uXperience Design Camp 2013 at the University of Waterloo Stratford Campus.
STRATFORD, Ont. (Monday, October 28, 2013) ─ Registration is open for the inaugural uXperience Design Camp 2013 at the University of Waterloo Stratford Campus.
uXperience Design Camp is aimed at students, software developers, designers, engineers, computer scientists, user experience (UX) professionals, educators, and industry leaders. It will give participants an immersive, hands-on learning experience in user experience design.
Racing against the clock, teams will be challenged to develop a plan for a user experience design that will work for an actual client and that client’s target audience. The weekend Design Camp will take place at the Stratford Campus on November 16th and 17th.
According to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, one trillion dollars is spent on IT projects a year and about 15 per cent of those projects are abandoned due to poor project design. It is estimated that the cost of fixing an error is four times more expensive than it would have been during the initial stages.
These findings have created demand for better understanding of User Experience (UX) and Usable Interface (UI) translating into career and business opportunities in these growing fields.
“UX involves a person’s behaviours, attitudes and emotions about using a particular product, system or service. It includes the practical, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership,” said Professor Karin Schmidlin, manager of the virtual incubation program at the Conrad Entrepreneurship, Business and Technology Centre. “What makes UX design different to other areas of design, is that everything starts with a focus on the useful, then moves to a focus on the usable and finally to a focus on the beautiful.”
A panel of experts will judge the UX solutions created at the camp. The top three teams will be awarded team prizes valued over $15,000. First prize will give the top team support and services from the Stratford Accelerator Centre to develop their innovation. They will also be invited to present their winning idea at DX3 in Toronto, Canada’s largest conference and trade show for the digital industry.
The uXperience Design Camp is open to 100 registrants who must work in a team format.
Professor Schmidlin will lead the camp alongside a team of UX, UI, mobile developers and successful entrepreneurs, including Dan Silvestru, executive in residence at Communitech. “The uXperience Design Camp will give participants a deeper understanding of the importance of user experience design in the rapidly evolving world of digital technology,” said Professor Schmidlin.
The City of Stratford, the Stratford Accelerator Centre partnered with Waterloo for the camp which received funding in partnership with the Canadian Digital Media Network, a federal Centre of Excellence in Commercialization and Research.
For more information about uXperience Design Camp can be found online.
In just half a century, the University of Waterloo, located at the heart of Canada's technology hub, has become one of Canada's leading comprehensive universities with 35,000 full- and part-time students in undergraduate and graduate programs. Waterloo, as home to the world's largest post-secondary co-operative education program, embraces its connections to the world and encourages enterprising partnerships in learning, research and discovery. In the next decade, the university is committed to building a better future for Canada and the world by championing innovation and collaboration to create solutions relevant to the needs of today and tomorrow. For more information about Waterloo, please visit www.uwaterloo.ca.
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Nick Manning
University of Waterloo
519-888-4451
226-929-7627
nmanning@uwaterloo.ca
www.uwaterloo.ca/news
@uWaterlooNews
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