Conferences for web and digital professionals
As we countdown to announcing the full Design ’19 program, we’ll focus some of the important themes for the event. At our conferences, curation of timely, important and valuable sessions is always a key concern. One of the challenges that keeps coming up in my conversations and reading is how to scale design. So, at […]
I’ve spoken and written frequently, and at length, about what I and many others see as the crisis facing what we call “the tech industry” (but as ‘software eats the world’ is really every industry). We’re waking up to the negative second order effects of the things we have been designing and building, often with […]
From being the preserve first of science fiction, and research labs, to the domain of computer scientists, AI now impacts, and provides tremendous opportunity for anyone involved in product designing development. Investigating the challenges and opportunities at the intersection of design, technology and business presented by AI and Machine Learning is the aim of our […]
Voice as a mode of human-computer interaction has been the next big thing for decades. In the meantime we’ve seen GUIs, and touch screens both come to prominence. But just as voice seemed an evolutionary dead end, along came Alexa (and Google Assistant, and Siri, and Cortana). In this presentation from Design ’18, Darla Sharpe, […]
As we count down to the launch of the program for Design, our Product Design conference, taking place in Melbourne in April, we’re looking at some of the most interesting presentations from last year’s inaugural Design conference. A 2013 report called ‘The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?’ left some occupations like […]
As we build toward the launch of our Design conference program in a couple of weeks, we’re revisiting some of the presentations from last year’s Design conference. Andy Polaine, co-author of Service Design: From Insight to Implementation, closed the conference with a mediation on design, and how so much design focusses on the short term. […]
Design systems are approaching a must-have for product and design teams. But while you understand the value, how do you make the case to decision makers who might not see it as much? In this session from Web Directions Summit ’18, Laura van Doore, Head of Product Design at Fathom, a B2B SaaS product in […]
I first met Yiying Lu, then a recent design graduate back 2008. She’d gained a degree of fame due to the adoption of her piece “Lifting up a Dreamer” by Twitter as the image you saw when Twitter was down (this was quite a thing back in the early days of Twitter!) We even featured […]
Yesterday we opened CFPs for all our 2019 conferences. So I thought it made sense to talk a little more about why you should consider doing so. But let’s first address the objections people have, the reasons we find not to speak or even contemplate it. But I’m terrified of public speaking First it is […]
While we only just wrapped up our 2018 events, we’re well into planning next year’s conferences. So, our calls for presentations for all our 2019 events are now open. We have 4 major events, Design, Code and Product in Melbourne, and then Summit in Sydney, which in 2019 will feature a separate Product Track, alongside […]
Since 2006 Web Directions has grown considerably, What was once a single event is now a family of related conferences across the year. But the essence of Web Directions is our annual, end of year event we now call Web Directions Summit. This year we returned to the Convention Centre in Sydney, which was our […]
Last year, long overdue, we added a new feature to our annual Summit, the Meetup Muster. The Meetup Muster was a cool addition to the event, introducing people to a range of Sydney’s tech meetups (SydCSS, SydJS, React Sydney, SydTechLeaders, SydPWA, Tech Talks). Many people come to conferences but don’t tap into the amazing meetup […]
Last year when we held our first, very successful AI conference, not a few people scratched their heads and asked “why is Web Directions holding an AI conference“. Very often AI and Machine Learning are associated with complex technical specialisation (and this is certainly required for a lot of work with AI and ML). But […]
So much of the energy and focus in our industry is on the what and how: on design, on the technologies we use, on business strategy, on tactics. Yet as legendary management thinker Peter Drucker (reportedly) said: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Drucker’s point is that if your organisational culture isn’t healthy, whatever else you […]
I have to be really candid. At the first event we ever ran, back in 2004, we only came to the realisation very close to the event that our speaker line-up was all male. We were chastened, and hopefully learnt our lesson early, and from that time on, here at Web Directions our goal has […]
Thanks for an amazing few days Web Directions. So many great themes of empathy, inclusion, collaboration, business impact through design, and keeping our future deeply human.
Laura van Doore Head of Product Design, Fathom
Australia's design conference with the world's leading expert
Melbourne April 11 & 12 2019
DetailsAustralia's conference for JavaScript and Front End Engineers
Melbourne June 20 & 21 2019
DetailsAustralia's conference for Product professionals
Melbourne August 1 & 2 2019
DetailsOur legendary event. Two big tracks, one Product/Design, one Developer focused.
Sydney November 2019
Details