Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Things go a bit quiet around here as we lead into and then host our conferences, which we did last week with both our Design Leaders and Design conferences, in Melbourne.

The room had a great buzz from the very beginning, a combination perhaps of the always fantastic coffee at the Arts Centre (and all our conferences, it’s a non-negotiable for us) and the amazing lineup of speakers. Every single one truly fantastic, whether the seasoned like Jeff Veen who we were immensely privileged to have open the show, through to a number of very first timers.

I’d written more than once about the sessions we had focussed on ethics, and on the responsibility of design for the impact, positive and negative on our users, and those sessions really did deliver.

Eva PenzeyMoog spoke powerfully about the potential impact of all manner of products and features on people experiencing family violence, with sobering statistics on the prevalence of domestic violence, and a sense too of how it’s far more than the stereotypical physical violence often portrayed in the media.

Jon Bell was Lead Designer on Twitter’s Abuse team for some time, and spoke openly about the nature of the challenges, and how the seemingly obvious solutions to online abuse may lead to their own negative outcomes.

Bu I don’t want to single out just these two, across the three days 30 speakers delivered a range of deeply valuable presentations across the full gamut of design.

If you missed it, well right now there are two ways you can capture some of the value you missed out on.

Kat was our social media presence across the three days and captured the essence of every presentation in real time with hundreds of tweets.

Here’s the tweets from Design, and here are those from Design Leaders

And has become a tradition, Ben Buchanan looks meticulously (indeed ridiculously) detailed notes, now published online as his ‘Big Stonkin’ Post‘.

These are so true ridiculously in-depth and detailed they’re almost as valuable as being there itself.

Don’t miss out in future

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