Design Thinking for the End of the World: Conference Talk Proposal

Introduction

I thoroughly enjoy delivering and creating conference presentations. Like many of you I assume, whenever I submit a proposal I write an abstract that captures whatever I can see dimly based upon my thinking at the moment relative to the conference theme. With the end only slightly in sight, writing the presentation itself is always a fun and challenging learning experience that takes my own thinking to the next level.

The proposal I just wrote titled Design Thinking for the End of the World is for the 2020 Colorado Emergency Management Conference to be held in February. The theme for the conference is "One Colorado: Preparing for Colorado Challenges," which to me evokes problem-solving, resilience, mitigation, disaster preparedness, and policy. Having been more theoretically focused in the past, I wanted to share something a little closer to practice. Drawing from recent and past reading around language and design, I thought up (prior to the submission, but further unpacked…