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Over the last few weeks we’ve been putting the spotlight on various areas of focus at our Design conference in Melbourne (it’s on next week, but there are still places left, so if you work in Design, don’t miss this!)

Design at Scale

We’ve looked at the intersection of AI and Design, and inclusive design, both strong areas of focus in John Maeda’s just released 2018 Design in Tech Report. Another of the key sections of this year’s report is Scaling Design, where Maeda observes “Design capabilities don’t scale like Moore’s Law”.

While we were programming the Design conference for months before this report was released only a couple of weeks back, the key points in this section of the report address so much of what we’ll be covering at Design it’s actually rather uncanny.

In recent years, as we’ve observed elsewhere, Design has gone from a nice to have, and been seen as largely cosmetic or aesthetic, to being recognised for its strategic and competitive value. As such the size and scale of design teams has grown significantly. But with that growth has come significant challenges–for individual designers, for teams, for entire organisations.

Increasing thought is being given to design systems, to the nature of design organisations, to the roles within the design profession. These are all areas we’ll cover in detail at Design:

• We’re covering Design Systems, specifically at scale, with Sarah Federman from Adobe talking about how they scale their design system across numerous products, and technologies at this giant of global design
• We’re focussing on user research and product management techniques, in Maeda’s words “vital for designers to understand to work more inclusively with customers and product colleagues” with Stephanie Troeth, Leisa Reichelt, Remya Ramesh, and others addressing these.
• Of particular note are Ben Barone-Nugent & Jamie Kimmel who’ll focus on how they think about design relationships, how this results in products that scale globally.

There’s much more besides this, on design systems and AI, design organisation to research, context strategy and emerging ideas. If you work in digital Design in Australia, it’s one to not miss!