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To a designer, “design” is how it works. To everybody else design is how it looks: nice or ugly. To a philosopher, “ethics” is how we act. To everybody else ethics is how it feels: good or bad.

With the recent call for more ethics in design it’s time to explore what philosophical ethics means within the practice of Human Computer Interaction design.

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What is the future of product design using experimental technology from blockchain to voice commands, AI, and IoT?

This talk covers what the future of ethical product design can be? Why and when should we use blockchain, or AI, or IOT? What are design principals we should keep in mind for creating with new technology? Instead of building future worlds imagined in the '60s during the Space Race, what is the future now, and how can we build it?

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Rachel Andrew is a front and back-end web developer, author and speaker. Author or co-author of 22 books including The New CSS Layout and a regular contributor to a number of publications both on and offline.

Rachel is co-founder of the CMS Perch and Notist, Editor in Chief of Smashing Magazine, a Google Developer Expert and an Invited Expert to the CSS Working Group. She writes about business and technology on her own site at rachelandrew.co.uk.

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WebAssembly is a fast, portable, compact, cross-browser binary format for compilation to the Web. It allows new types of applications and heavy 3D games to run efficiently in browsers. We'll describe what web assembly is, the problems it solves, the low level format and compilation tools available to try it out. In addition, the interfacing between compiled language modules and Javascript is explained.

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GraphQL is being adopted throughout the industry, and for good reason. In this talk, we'll explore some of the use-cases and success stories of top companies as they've made the move to GraphQL. We'll also offer guidance as to how to move through the phases of adoption at your company.

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Machine learning can have some pretty complicated concepts to grasp if you’re not a data scientist. However, recent developments in tooling make it more and more accessible for developers and people with little or no experience.

One of these advancements is the ability to now train and run machine learning algorithms and models in the browser, opening this world to front-end developers to learn and experiment.

In this presentation, we will talk about the different applications, possibilities, tools and resources, as well as show a few examples and demos, so you can get started building your own experiments using machine learning in JavaScript.

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The web is entering a new era of design opportunities with the introduction of CSS Grid, Photoshop like effects such as filters and blend modes and importantly the increasing support for Variable Fonts. What practical and creative opportunities do variable fonts offer us? What are the benefits over standard fonts? How can we use them in our web projects?

Lets explore the practicalities and possibilities of Variable Fonts on the web and what we can do to make the most out of them.

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HTTP/2 server push gives us the ability to proactively send assets to a browser without waiting for them to be requested. Sounds great, right?!

However, is this new mechanism really the silver bullet we all thought it was? Is it time to abandon our build systems and stop bundling our assets entirely? Or are lack of server support and browser inconsistencies holding us back? Lastly, what are new specifications such as cache digests and the 103 status code doing to improve the situation?

Using new research and real-world examples, this talk will take a deep dive into HTTP/2 server push, exploring the current and future best practices for loading assets in the browser. Giving us the knowledge to make better decisions when loading our web pages and ultimately leading to faster, more resilient user experiences.

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Sometimes you write code that doesn't work. If you're lucky, you notice immediately; if you're NOT so lucky, then you might not notice until it's all the way into your customers' hands when... BANG! NoMethodError on undefined TypeError DANGER DANGER, etc.

What this talk is about is how to discover errors as soon as possible, and why doing that is valuable. Focusing on JavaScript, we'll have a practical look at how we can structure our code (to avoid propagating errors) and what tools we can use (linting, tests and types) to avoid these nasty surprises.

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JavaScript starting out as a way to make our web pages a bit more interactive, but over the past few years morphed into unmissable pillar of the web. But with it rise in popularity so have the attack vectors on our code.

Luckily there has been a lot of improvements into the security mechanisms available to us. Unfortunately almost all of them require us to take action.

In this talk we will go over all of the recent additions to the browser security stack and how you can massively increase the security of your site with relatively little work.

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How do you scale your codebase? We have more than 80 apps, 150 developers in 4 different countries and more than 700k LOC. With the codebase that big it's vitally important to have shared patterns, principals and standards and it's even more important to make sure everyone actually follow those standards.

Learn about the strategies and tools that Atlassian has developed to create and support a high-velocity, high-quality engineering environment, challenges and obstacles that we had to overcome and hoops that we had to jump through on the way.

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Ever gone to a website only to click a link and have it turn out like the talk title? Or written code that introduced this bug? Can types prevent this? Absolutely! Stringly typed is a term that defines most peoples usage of of types today, thanks to a horrible introduction through Java at uni.

Through real world examples that nearly every developer will have hit in their career, we can start to move beyond stringly typed code to make impossible states impossible before they become bugs for our users, or even before we run the code or tests. Along the way you will learn how some terms like 'Parametricity' have real world applications and not just the work of academics and will actually help you write bug proof code that is easier to reason about, and understand.

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Understanding the css box model is critical for building flexible and accurate abstractions. However, interacting with it in JavaScript is extremely confusing. This talk will explore the various positioning apis such as getBoundingClientRect, offsetTop, scrollWidth and so on - what they measure and how to get them to work together.

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Part 1: What's the problem?Virtual DOM (React, Vue.js, Angular and the like) is a jargon which most web engineers have heard of before. If you are one of those engineers, then you probably think that Virtual DOM makes DOM faster when it comes to updating. But however, that idea is a misconception or rather, it is just an idea in which users of Virtual DOM promote. People often hope some UI libraries utilizing Virtual DOM would be much faster compared to some libraries such as Jquery, but that's not what Virtual DOM is supposed to be. While I have the same opinion that Virtual DOM assists us in many aspects, but I will explain why fast-updating and fast-rendering are not the cases in Virtual DOM.

Part 2: If it is not for fast-updating and fast-rendering, then what does it do?We'll first examine on how DOM creation and update happens when manually doing it. By going through the process of creating and updating DOM, we would have a deep understanding of how DOM works in order to see what Virtual DOM can do for us. After showing some glitches of the DOM, we will be going into Virtual DOM world and knowing what it is capable of. Having done all, we could come to a conclusion that with the help of Virtual DOM, the DOM updating and creating side would be as efficient as possible whereas we would have to do more work on JS side.

Part 3: Is it worth using Virtual DOM?There are many good things about Virtual DOM but massive performance is not one of them. The difference between DOM and Virtual DOM is similar to coding Python or Javascript versus coding in C or Pascal. Hence, there is always a trade-off. Also, with Virtual DOM, we would have to spend more time to examine what part in Virtual DOM we have to handcraft (explain and link with Part 2). For some parts that require a lot of performance, it is not even possible to do so (link with Part 2). Therefore, Virtual DOM is just one of the available tools for us to use at our own convenience.

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In this talk, Yiying Lu will share her 10 years of cross-cultural design practice for global brands such as Disney, Twitter, Wasabi Warriors and so on. She will tell the visual stories of the Twitter Fail Whale and the official Dumpling Emoji. She will also share her creative process on how she overcomes design challenges when working on bilingual creative projects such as the Shanghai Disney Recruitment Campaign, Australian-Chinese real estate brand Home789, and localize global brand 500 Startups for the Korean and Indian market, and so on. Join Yiying on a journey of exploring cross-cultural creativity through colorful logos, whimsical illustrations, symbolic typography designs with occasional puns & jokes.

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Metaphor is one of our most powerful innate capacities as humans, and unlocking its power in UX research work can bring us to a whole new level of insight and stakeholder engagement. Metaphor is a lot like sketching - most people wouldn’t identify themselves as skilled with it. But almost everyone can use it productively with a little bit of attention and practice.

Cyd’s talk will illustrate how to use your metaphorical capacity to do great qualitative analysis. She’ll dig into how to source apt metaphors from users and from your team, how to use them as pointers into the salient parts of a mountain of qualitative data (interview transcripts, for example), how to evaluate which ones are useful, and how to combine them in clusters to get at deep insights. Finally, she’ll show how to share metaphor-driven insights with stakeholders so that design and dev teams can come together and create great experiences.

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Come for a walk through the development process of Airbnb's illustrative aesthetics–describing their philosophies on color, representation, and editorial voice. Jennifer will even discuss how superstitions helped localize the style for Airbnb in China.

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The past few years have been filled with chatbot experiments—some brilliant, many not—but the future has yet to be experienced. As artificial intelligence capabilities advance, conversation will become the next major interaction model, not just a messenger experience.

This talk will explain why conversation will play such a large role in the future, define how it will happen, and suggest how you can integrate conversation into your product roadmap.

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The presentation shows designers how to approach word design using a simple step-by-step process. It then introduces them to the tools and concepts they’ll need to do it well.

They’ll learn how to use language globalisation guidelines; reading level calculators; and design, language, and brand style guides in the writing process. They’ll also learn the elements of tone of voice, the impact of grammar on emotional connection, when (and when not) to reach for the thesaurus, and more. In 20 minutes, we'll unpack the challenge of word design in a pragmatic way that empowers participants to do it better, starting today.

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The user story sits at the centre of most agile development methodologies.

But what makes a good story? and where do stories come from? What do we do with them once they've been estimated, prioritised, re-sized and broken down? How can we maintain our sense of the big picture when it's broken down into tiny puzzle pieces? How does that help us build good products?

This talk puts the focus on the "user" telling the story to understand their requirements for the product. It then turns back to the team to look at how we hear and discuss those stories in order to bring them to life to build the product, and build it right.

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The W3C published its updated accessibility standard (WCAG 2.1) in June. What does it mean for designers? See how the new criteria affect layout and interaction design, including a shoutout to touchscreen devices (finally!)

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Ethics need to be at the core of everything we build. We have to consider our impact and rethink how to build digital products. This way we will not only build more responsible products, but gain additional benefits in the areas of performance, security, privacy and user happiness. This talk will show how to truly care about users & improve the user experience at the same time. Most importantly, this talk will be a technical inspiration, question the status quo and help us build for a better web.

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Design Systems have reached peak popularity. It’s no secret that the topic of Design Systems have been an outrageously popular topic over the past few years. Every design team has either built one, is building one, or wants to build one. But it’s not designers who we have to convince when it comes to investing in the build of a design system. Especially if we aren’t lucky enough to be in an organisation where design has a ‘seat at the table’. How can we sell the benefits of a design system with more focus on appealing to upper management, who may not see the same benefits we do?

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We often take short cuts when we do our designs and end up copying others or relying on what we think are ‘best practice’ concepts. While this is often enough, if we don’t question what is best practice or do our own research we may not achieve usable outcomes.

Most of us are aware of the ‘F reading’ pattern, but are there other common human behaviours that we should be including in our designs?

In this talk, Amanda will look at a few ideas from other disciplines, such as anthropology, neuroscience and psychology that should be considered when designing internal user interfaces.

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For a while during Design18 this was the top tweet... https://twitter.com/200okpublic/status/984295887424839682 ...it seems to have struck a chord. So, this talk expands on what I meant.

The talk goes through things designers and devs should know about their counterparts; from the history and movements of their respective crafts (OO and FP are different, pop art and minimalism are different..) to specific tools and techniques they should know (eg. devs should know about colour theory, designers should know about versioning and release cycles).

Yes, designers should code. Yes, devs should design. No, neither one needs to do that to production quality unless they really want to go all-in (with a shout out to Diana McDonald... there is crossover here).

Bringing it together at the end I would be talking about how design and dev should be working together throughout the process; and the golden rule of collaborative knowledge - "learn about others as you'd have them learn about you".

(If the crossover with Diane's talk is too much; I could extract the design-for-dev stuff for Code instead. But I would love to do the inclusive both-sides version. Also I'd try to back up my anecdotal material by putting a survey out there to ask other people what they wish their counterparts knew.)

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