It’s confirmed: San Francisco-based Canuck Steve Portigal will deliver the closing keynote at UXcamp Ottawa 2012

The Power of Bad Ideas
Oct 13, 4:45pm / 60 MINUTES

In business and in life, we pursue the good stuff and champion people who are known for their good ideas. But when we place too strong an emphasis on just the good, we may neglect to consider the bad ones. In design and in brainstorming, deliberately seeking out bad ideas is a powerful way to unlock creativity. Generating bad ideas can reveal our assumptions about the difference between bad and good, and often seemingly bad ideas turn out to be good ones. Jotly and Cow Clicker were jokes/parodies (e.g., not good ideas) that have been surprisingly successful. Neil Young and Crazy Horse have covered folk songs. An action blockbuster features a US president swinging a silver axe against vampires. In this talk, I’ll explore how opening up the bad idea valve can lead unexpectedly to the kind of success we aim for with our good ideas.

Questions answered in this session:
What benefit can I get from deliberately coming up with bad ideas?
How can bad ideas lead to good ideas?
What do bad ideas reveal about our implicit standards for “good” and “bad”?
What are some examples of presumptive bad ideas that are actually good idea?
Is there a way to tell if my bad idea is really and truly a stinker?

Speaker Bio: Steve Portigal

Steve is the founder of Portigal Consulting, a boutique insights and strategy firm in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the past 15 years Steve has interviewed families eating breakfast, rock musicians, credit-default swap traders, and radiologists. His work has informed the development of music gear, wine packaging, medical information systems, corporate intranets, videoconferencing systems, and iPod accessories. Steve writes regularly for Core77, interactions, and the Portigal blog, All This ChittahChattah. Steve is a fellow Canadian (he has a graduate degree in HCI from the University of Guelph) and is an avid photographer who has a Museum of Foreign Groceries in his home.

Steve was an advisor on the board of the IA Institute and has been a featured presenter at major tech and UX conferences like CHI, Interaction, SXSW, UI Conf, UXLX, UX Australia, Web Visions etc. He was also featured in Business Week, the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Way back, Steve also built one of the first online communities (Undercover, a Rolling Stones fan group) in 1992, nurturing it from a time when the Internet was an underground academic technology through to today, as part of a global info-infrastructure.