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Last week we held our newest conference Design, in Melbourne a city we love visiting and holding conferences in.

For a first time event, the engagement, the energy, dare I say it “the vibe” were amazing, the quality of the presentations, from experienced international speakers, through to first time local speakers was as good as it gets.

Actually, there wasn’t just one but two brand new conferences, as we also ran our symposium-style Design Leaders, modelled after our successful Code Leaders conference, and focussed on the challenges facing more senior design professionals, managers and leaders.

We wrote in recent weeks about a number of the themes that had emerged in the content, specifically, the way in which AI and design intersect, and the opportunities and challenges this poses, on inclusive design, and on scaling design.

But whether you made it along or not, there’s a huge amount of value from the event to be had, though speakers notes, slides, and perhaps most of all, Ben Buchanan’s now legendary “Big Stonkin’ Post”. Ben has been doing these incredibly rich detailed writeups of our conferences since 2007. I have literally never seen more detailed notes on a presentation anywhere than these.
Once again the captured the ideas from every single session at Design. Without exaggeration, It’s almost better than being there.

Speakers notes and slides

Many of our speakers have already shared their slides and resources via twitter but we through we would bring them all together in one place in this email.

Sara Wachter Boettcher

Sara opened Design, addressing the challenge of toxic technology and the ethical responsibilities of the Design profession. Many of her ideas are captured in her recent book, Technically Wrong Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech the last couple of dozen copies of which in Australia we managed to get hold of we sold out of, but you can find other ways to purchase the book via the link above.

Diana MacDonald

Diana addressed the age old question, “should designers learn to code” in an interesting light, “how much code should designers learn?”. She’s provided the slides, notes and a really comprehensive list of resources from the talk Should I Really Bother Learning to Code?

Remya Ramesh

Remya’s slides from the talk The Art of Mindfulness in Product Design. A really valuable introduction to the ideas of mindfulness, and the value they can have in your day to day life, personal and professional.

Cory-Ann Joseph

Cory-Ann’s incredibly comprehensive speaker notes from the talk Why Poker Playing AI Should have Designers Looking for a New Job.

Darla Sharp

Darla’s reading and watching list from the talk Designing for Voice: Alexa, Google Assistant and Beyond. A lot here, of real value.

Hilary Cinis

Hilary’s notes from Crafting Ethical AI products and Services – a UX Guide. Hilary has been refining her ideas on this topic for months and this is the latest iteration.

Nathan Kinch

Nathan addressed the key challenges for any business or organisation which collects data from their users, that is all of them, and how we manage user data is at the heart of the most important value, trust. Nathan has outlined some of the principles he outlined in his talk It’s time to design for trust, in the article Data Trust, by Design:Principles, Patterns and best Practices (part 1); and (part 2) Upfront Terms and Conditions. Plus, thanks to Nathan download a free copy of Designing for Trust: the Data Transparency Playbook.

Sally Bagshaw

At Design, content, words, and writing came up time and again as critical to good user experience. Sally is a content strategist with unparalleled experience, and delved more deeply into the relationship between content strategy and UX, in her presentation, Beyond Words: Using Content Strategy for Better UX.

Lucie Paterson

Lucie spoke about the way in which design has been changing the nature of ACMI, making it a more user focussed museum, and has posted her slides from the talk Evolving an Organisation’s Culture through Design.

Chris Stonestreet

Chris addressed the challenge of outsourcing design, and there are slides from the talk Outsourcing Design, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Andy Polaine

Andy’s closing keynote brought together so many of the themes of the conference, and he’s posted the slides from the talk Design for the Long Term.

Don’t want to miss the next one?

If all this sounds like something that you’re interested in, Design ’19 will return May 2019 to Melbourne. But you don’t have to wait that long! Our end of year Summit features both a design and engineering track, and we’ve already lined up an extraordinary array of speakers you won’t want to miss out on.

To make sure you don’t miss out on these, and to get the best possible value, just jump on our mailing list, for a weekly update on ideas, articles and more, alongside special offers and news about our events.