UX Speaker Series #8: Dave Kim
Program Officer, Financial Servics for the Poor, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Topic: Design for Financial Inclusion
This article is the end of a series. Previous: UXSS #7
Disclaimer: in light of the recent events of the world (for readers in the future, it’s March, and COVID-19 has recently gotten every public gathering canceled), I have not been focused on my blog over the last few weeks. This article, and any others with this same disclaimer, have been written some time removed from the events they serve to describe. Therefore, they may not be up the the quality and level of detail as I aspire to. That said, I imagine that what I write could still be useful to someone else in some capacity, so I will still write what I can to hopefully produce something of use.
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This lecture was originally recorded remotely on March 6 anyway. I want to offer the same disclaimer because, while I do not have much more to say about this talk, I wanted to wrap up the UXSS today, and I’m now a few weeks removed from the last time I attended in person. Here are my notes:
This final talk was more case study than topical. As I’ve mentioned before, I expect most talks to be this way — as the audience is expected to be more informed, there is less value in having talks about fundamentals. Some of the early talks in the series were really just lectures on new topics, with a few examples from the speaker’s professional work interspersed. However, the audience is largely graduate students, so there are only so many completely “new” topics to cover. Case-study presentations are much less interesting to me, so I usually have less to say about them. I imagine that they get more interesting as I have experience — the usual cast of department professors I see at guest lectures always have interesting questions for each speaker. I imagine this mechanism works something like this:
- Option 1: attendee is mostly unfamiliar with larger topic area
→ topic discussion is interesting because it’s largely new information
→ case-study discussion is uninteresting because attendee cannot relate it to their own specific experiences - Option 2: attendee is familiar and experienced with larger topic area
→ topic discussion is boring because they already know the subject
→ case-study discussion is interesting because they can compare the speaker’s context to their own, and examine differences in methods, outcomes, etc. in-depth
As I learn more, I can enter the dead zone between, where I still have little to no hands-on experience, but I have requisite background knowledge about a variety of topics. This is the worst timeline — where I attend lectures but every lecture is ill-fit for me. The solution is obvious — I need experience, so I’m taking steps to get it.
As for the series as a whole, I have already touched a little on its structure. It was supposed to be 10 weeks, with 11 different speakers (one pair). One speaker midway through the quarter cancelled from personal illness, presumably not coronavirus-related, and the final week was canceled because of coronavirus. Most of the lectures were topic-based, which was great for me, because I got to hear from industry professionals about some academic and some professional topics. My current mindset is that nobody knows everything, and that there’s always room to learn.. In particular, everyone has their own perspective, and I am limited to my own perspective unless I can learn to see through others’. Listening to as many speakers & reading as many books as I possibly can will allow me to diversify my experience and perspective more than I ever could on my own. The speaker series was a great investment of my time throughout the quarter, and I’ll definintely be attending next year’s, the world allowing.
