Workshops

Workshops are practical, hands-on, content-rich deep dives into new topics or critical design skills. Ideaplatz founder Cheryl Platz has delivered workshops around the world in a variety of circumstances: corporate workshops, conference workshops, remote workshops, cross-cultural workshops with live translation – the list goes on. Rates vary based on length, travel requirements and expected attendance, and include both flat rate and door split options. To inquire about booking a workshop, contact us at info@ideaplatz.com.

[ Professional Design Workshops | Personal Development Workshops | Student Workshops ]

Current workshops

Professional Design Workshops

Our newest workshop is based directly on the content from Cheryl’s book, Design Beyond Devices: Creating Multimodal, Cross-Device Experiences. It was designed for remote delivery from the ground up, and has successfully been delivered for corporate clients but has yet to receive a public debut due to pandemic conditions.

Multimodal Design Fundamentals is a full-day conference workshop, or available as a 3-day workshop series for corporate clients.

Are you looking to power up your customer outreach across multiple disciplines – not just UX Research, but UX Design, product management, program management, and beyond? Capturing Customer Context is a half-day, hands-on workshop version of the talk content pulled from Cheryl’s book Design Beyond Devices. Designed for remote participation from the ground up, participants will practice using a new framework for getting greater detail about the world in which their customers operate. Informed by Cheryl’s work on multimodal experiences and her work as an improv teacher and performer.

Personal Development Workshops

By popular demand, Cheryl developed a 2-hour workshop to help folks looking to adopt lessons from the performing arts to improve their experience presenting and interacting in workspaces. This workshop draws from Cheryl’s experience as an improv teacher, improv performer, senior design leader, and internationally acclaimed public speaker to provide a basic toolkit for folks looking to level up their own personal presence.

Student Workshops

As an extension of the hypothesis Cheryl posed in her 2011 Interaction talk “Computer Engineer Barbie”, this workshop was designed to bring the concepts of UX design to middle school and high school aged students in hopes of connecting the abstract technical skills taught in school with real-life human benefit. This course has been taught to hundreds upon hundreds of students across multiple camps like Digigirlz, Girls who Code, and Dawgbytes.

Retired Workshops

The workshop that started it all: Cheryl’s voice design workshop has been taught on multiple continents, in multiple languages, and has inspired a generation of voice designers. The content remains salient, and as text-based interaction paradigms like ChatGPT become more prevalent, the skills required to create resilient, repeatable voice prompts will become more in demand. In a world where almost every device you work with is capable of voice interaction, add voice design to your toolbox to differentiate your experiences and make your work more inclusive.

Due to the massive changes caused by large language models, we no longer proactively offer this course, choosing to focus on multimodal design and other topics.

Future workshops

For an additional fee, custom workshops can be commissioned. Topics that are on Cheryl’s shortlist include:

  • Half the Blank Page: Storyboarding for Design Communication
  • Creative Collaboration with Improv
  • Successful Design Strategy
  • The Art of Shared Understanding: Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration at Scale

About the instructor

Cheryl Platz was the initial product designer and VUI designer for the newly-announced Echo Look at Amazon. Her experience with voice user interfaces dates back to her work in 2006 on one of the first voice-enabled titles for the Nintendo DS (Disney Friends). Since then, she’s had the incredible opportunity to work on voice UI for Alexa, Cortana, and Windows Automotive. Cheryl has contributed to new product design and natural user interface design for consumer devices, video games, PCs, and cars. Her work on the Echo Show, Nintendo DS, and Windows Automotive also made her a pioneer in multimodal experience design. All the while, Cheryl was developing her instructional skills between her improv teaching, internal corporate workshops, and her work teaching design workshops to middle school and high school students. In 2017, she founded Ideaplatz to enable her to teach advanced topics like voice design in workshops across the world. In 2020, Cheryl published her first book, Design Beyond Devices: Creating Multimodal, Cross-Device Experiences, and expanded her workshop repertory to include this new material.

Cheryl walks students through a voice flow diagram at Interaction 2017.