Impact, Behaviour, Insights, AI

Our three this month speakers are:
Emilie Forrest
Sophie Costin
Tucker MacNeill
Location: Runway East, Brighton 📍
Date/Time: Tues 19 May at 6pm (talks start at 6.30pm) 🕕
Pizza and NA drinks are provided 🍕

Emilie Forrest
About the talk
For many learning teams, qualitative discovery is treated as a luxury rather than a core capability. It’s either done once at the start of a project or avoided as it’s seen as too time-consuming and expensive.
Emilie will challenge that assumption and show how discovery can become part of business as usual. This includes a practical, human-centred approach to gathering insight, building a structured body of evidence and turning it into action.
The session will also explore how AI can be an integral part of this process, without outsourcing critical thinking and human judgement.
Bio
Emilie Forrest is Co-founder of Freeformers, where she helps organisations use employee data to design and improve workplace experiences in measurable ways. Her work focuses on closing the gap between insight and action.
She works with learning and HR teams to develop data strategies, track value and develop the capability to investigate and act on employee insight. She has led programmes with global organisations across the public, private and third sectors, building practical capability in data-informed decision-making and experience design.
Emilie is known for asking awkward questions. Her favourite three are: What are we trying to achieve? How will we know if we’ve succeeded? So what does this mean?

Sophie Costin
The science surprise: making learning more human in a the age of AI
Surprise sits at the heart of how we learn. Too little, and we disengage. Too much, and we feel overwhelmed. In this 15-minute session, we’ll explore the science of surprise and how it can be a powerful emotional driver of attention, memory and behaviour change.
In a world drowning in AI-generated content, taking an emotion-led approach to learning design is more important than ever. Expect practical tips, case studies and maybe one or two surprises along the way…
Bio
Sophie is Director of Learning at one of the UK’s leading immersive learning studios. She’s an award-winning learning designer, consultant and speaker. Combining research-based insights with emerging technologies, Sophie’s collaborated with academics to evidence behaviour change through her designs. Over the last fifteen years, she’s designed flagship solutions for some of the world’s largest companies.

Tucker MacNeill
The Good, the Bad, and the Technologically Ugly: The impact of AI in Higher Education.
AI/LLMs have been affecting all industries and institutions in very different ways. Higher Ed, whilst like many has been finding AIs/LLMs to be amazing tools for productivity, has also been wrestling with the downsides of every student being able to write an essay via prompt. All learning, both summative and formative, has been challenged by the advent of AI/LLMs, leading to sundry ways of coping with the new world. I’ll give a brief highlight of how the University of Brighton has been working with staff and students to find their way through the AI weeds.
Bio
Tucker is a Learning Technologiest who has been working in Higher Education, with a brief break teaching art for three years in Secondary Ed, since 1995. He works with Academic teachers and researchers using digital technologies to advance both educational and institutional goals.