It’s time for Part Two of the Program Launch for Web Directions Summit 17: the Product & Design Track.
We are returning to our most popular conference format: two days, with two tracks – one focused on Engineering, the other on Product & Design, plus over-arching opening and closing keynotes on each day – a format to suit the whole team.
In this way, we are positioning Summit as a coming together of the different disciplines we practise, and as a peak event on your team’s professional development calendar.
We launched the Engineering Track program on Wednesday, and today we’re going to share with you the full program for the Product & Design Track of Summit 17.
Given this, we’re extending the Super Early Bird period by one week to Friday 22 September. And remember, if you register now to lock in the lowest possible pricing, you can pay later – even if that’s after the Early Bird closes.
Read on for an overview of the design track or Register now (don’t forget the special offer at the end of this email).
Product & Design Track, Day One
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Lessons from the Death of the PC
Chris Messina
As the PC meets its slow demise, we stand on a precipice overlooking a broad shift in how technology is designed and serves people, with new hardware and embedded technologies that spell new paradigms for user experience, voice experience, and conversation experience.
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The Landscape of (Extended) Reality
Rob Manson
For a technology that’s been over 55 years in the making, it’s taken a long time for VR to become an “overnight success”. What’s driving this buzz and how does VR relate to Augmented, Mixed, and Extended Reality?
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DesignOps: The Future of Design, as a Service
Mark Dalgleish
By focusing developers entirely on translating a company’s design language into production-ready code and monitoring its real-world effectiveness, teams can deliver high quality design across large organisations at a pace not previously possible.
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Style Guides, So Hot Right Now
Ben Birch & Tim Churchward
A look at emerging tools and strategies that drive collaboration at the boundary of design and development, point out some pitfalls you might want to avoid, and help you evaluate the right approach for your team and organisation.
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Retros, Research and Opinionated Design
Nicola Rushton
How do you create a culture of open communication, fast feedback and shared ownership? When it comes to normalising the sharing of feelings and helping a team own their process, structure is key.
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Disruptive Design: The Designer as an Agent of Change
Rona Shaanan
You’re a designer, hired by an engineer-driven company that wants to get some of that umpteen per cent rise in productivity from being design driven. You are the agent of change. Now what? |
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A Life on the Web
Dan Rubin
Dan has lived a life curiously suited to the web, one that has eschewed the traditional linear career structure and more closely resembles the inter-connected, graph-like nature of the web itself. Find out what he’s learned along the way. |
So that’s Day One – although there’s actually one more speaker to lock in. Even then, we’re deep-diving into some major key topics already. Let’s see what’s on Day Two.
Product & Design Track, Day Two
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Artificial Intelligence: Making a Human Connection
Genevieve Bell
It’s tempting to keep separate the art and science of the robot and the artificial intelligence that underpins it. However, there are reasons to thread them back together and understand how the story of AI is connected to the history of human culture.
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13 Golden Rules of Typography on the Web
Richard Rutter
Typography is what comes between the author and the reader. If you design websites or use CSS then you are a typographer. The guidelines in this talk combine implementation details with typographic theory, to set you on the road to designing beautiful and effective responsive typography.
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Designing Conversations
Lauren Lucchese
How do we design for conversational UIs, when the content is the experience, and words are the interface? Can we design contextually relevant conversations for bots that evoke emotion and lead to relationships rooted in trust, empathy, and understanding?
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Designing Better Coffee
Simon Wright
How the idea for, and design of, a new brand of ethical coffee came to be, and how the design was informed by the business and ethical goals, while these, too, were in turn shaped by the design decisions.
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Designing for Extremes
Sarah Pulis
Designing for the “average user” doesn’t mean you are designing for everyone. It means you’re designing for no-one. There is no average user. But what happens if instead you deliberately design for the extremes, for each individual?
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Personalised Curiosity: Why and how machine learning can keep your users surprised and engaged
Kazjon Grace
How an AI model of curiosity inspired by cognitive science can be used to encourage us to broaden our tastes.
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On Mobile, Context is King
Oliver Weidlich
Most mobile service designs take no notice of what the device knows, or previous interactions, and assume each ‘channel’ is a new unconnected experience. But in a mobile-connected world, we can design richer and more contextual experiences. |
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Don’t Kill Them Softly: Fostering a Culture of Fearless Feedback
Amélie Lamont
Like opinions, harmful or useless feedback can kill your team by demoralisation. Design Anthropology can inform a framework that fosters a fearless feedback culture focusing on creating value, rather than pointing out flaws. |
So, like the Engineering Track, we’ve curated a seriously substantial program of Product & Design presentations, each focused on a key topic or issue facing designers now and into the immediate future.
Now, you should be aware that tickets are already selling fast (just as they did in Melbourne for Code, when we sold out before Early Bird even closed). In fact, as you’ll see below, for Summit we’ve already sold out of Gold tickets.
Pricing
Register during the Primary Early Bird period up to and including Friday 22 September and get $200 off the regular cost.
- • Classic Summit ticket (conference only) for just$999 (save $200)
- • Silver Summit ticket (conference plus videos) for just $1,199(save $200)
- • Gold Summit ticket – sorry, sold out!
NB Don’t forget the option of a Three Day Pass to Summit plus our new Culture or Reality conferences – outstanding value!
You’ll find much more info about the speakers and their presentations on the Summit 17 website.
Curating a two-track conference is a bit like putting together two conferences at once, and there’s an inevitable concern to make each track as potent as the other. With this conference, I think we’ve really achieved something special with both tracks.
If your work focuses on Product & Design, I think you’ll find Summit 17 to be just what you need.
See you there.