Speakers
Jennifer DanielCreative Director of Expression Design at GoogleDesigning for digital communication: closing the gap between what we type and what we mean
Technology has placed artificial confines around how we communicate with each other, forcing us to be creative in how we use digital platforms to say exactly what we mean. In this talk, Jennifer Daniel will explore how communication is rooted in primal urges around our presence, priorities, and personalities, and how we can use this understanding to design better products. She’ll discuss how she uses machine learning to generate everything from augmented reality experiences to old school illustrated avatars and will share insights into how she tries to build technology in an inclusive way that reflects all forms of communication needs.
Jennifer Daniel
Jennifer Daniel is the Creative Director on the Expression design team at Google, overseeing creative direction across Google’s communications products. Her work designing machine learning generated selfie stickers in Allo, Google’s messaging app, was recognized by Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Awards in 2017.
Prior to joining Google, Jennifer was an Art Director and Graphics Editor at the New York Times for 10 years. During her time there, she worked in the newsroom covering a breadth of topics—ranging from government shutdowns, to the Olympics, to goth culture. From there, Jennifer went on to become the Graphics Director at Bloomberg Businessweek, where she oversaw the graphics for a number of award-winning issues (including the “It’s Global Warming, Stupid” and “The Steve Jobs Memorial” issues). Her illustrations have been published in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Wired.
When not at work, Jennifer can be found playing hide-and-seek with her twin toddlers in their yurt in Berkeley, California.
Dr. Camela LoganUX researcher at FacebookMaking simulated environments more accessible with cross-cultural research
UX Research – the direct or indirect study of people’s behaviors, norms, and/or pain points with products and experiences – is one common way in which design identifies clear, validated people problems and turns good products into great ones. Conducting this research not just within but also across cultures has become the norm, as companies introduce their products to new markets and develop products that touch the lives of people around the world with the click of a button. But what about when you’re designing a product that - through auditory, visual, and other forms of sensory feedback – bring users into an entirely new environment or culture that has no parallel in the real world? How might an understanding of people’s behaviors and norms today help inform development of products of tomorrow?
In this talk, I will discuss the heightened value of integrating cross cultural strategies into UX research around technologies that support simulated environments, like VR and AR. I will highlight why an understanding of how people from different cultures communicate with others is needed for product in these spaces, which routinely support the gathering of and communication between people from different regions of the world. You will leave with specific ways to gain a deeper, cross-cultural understanding of communication norms of research participants through UX research.
Dr. Camela Logan
Dr. Camela Logan is a UX researcher at Facebook with a background in cultural anthropology and foreign languages, and a strong conviction in the power of fostering cross-cultural communication among product teams. Outside of digging into what matters most to people from cultures other than her own, her super powers include thoughtful gift giving and baking (she's also an award-winning French pastry chef).
Isha KasliwalSenior UI/UX Designer Developer at TwitchWhat Happens Next? Everything That Comes After Setting Up Your Design System
So you’ve gotten buy-in, you’ve made an inventory of designs and components, and you’ve set up your team’s first design system. What happens next? This talk will explore maintaining a design system, as well as new challenges that arise once your design system matures. Topics that this talk will cover will include: documentation, adoption, support, tooling, and architecture.
Isha Kasliwal
Originally from the east coast, Isha traded New York City for San Francisco to join a group of creative thinkers that are focused on solving problems at the forefront of frontend design. Isha is a Senior UI/UX Designer Developer working on the design system at Twitch.
Previously, she was a Senior UX Engineer on the Design Systems team at Salesforce, who works on architecting scalable CSS for the Lightning Design System. She also worked as both a frontend engineer and UX designer at a fashion tech startup for 3 years. As a systems thinker, she designs, builds, operates, and maintains the links and interactions between functional components and visual designs.
While her day job includes concentrating on patterns and style guides, she’s also passionate about art, technology, and science, and where they all intersect. On the weekends, you can find her somewhere outdoors, eating a lot and looking for adventure.
Mala KumarUX/UI Designer at UNICEFSubstantive Tech
An increasingly understood downside of the current global tech industry is designing for the rich. The iPhone X, for example, retails at around $1000. Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of people in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia make less than $5,000 a year. For a decade, I have worked in technology for international development (ICT4D), which looks at how tech can impact development solutions. My presentation will focus on how we in ICT4D use UX design, agile and other common tech methodologies to design solutions for the majority of the world, not just the top of the economic echelon.
In my talk, I will speak about my work at the United Nations, international NGOs, and how tech has shaped my personal life in Africa, Asia, Europe and New York.
Mala Kumar
Mala is a tech for international development (ICT4D) professional who specializes in UX/UI design. She is based in New York, with frequent travel worldwide. She has been fortunate to work, live, study and travel to 30+ countries in four continents. Her debut novel, The Paths of Marriage, has been sold around the world and is recognized as a message of equality. Her articles and Op-Eds have been featured on major global publications, including The Guardian, The Advocate, CNN India and USA Today.
She specializes in UX, UI, and user/human-centered design for international development digital tools. She currently splits her time between the ICT4D and software development company, Sonjara, Inc., and UNICEF.
Dr. Kate StonePhD exam in physics, University of Cambridge, and founder of the company NovaliaDesigning for a connected world.
The march of the digital frontline seems to have relentlessly vaporised so much of what is around us and sent it to the cloud. With our heads now so often stuck in those clouds we seem to be losing touch of what is physically around us; including each other. What if we could add a digital soul to everyday objects and design, prototype and manufacture physical products almost as quickly as digital experiences? My work is a journey towards attempting to let some of this happen.
Dr. Kate Stone
Bloomberg has predicted that Dr Kate Stone is going to shake up the world as we know it - in short, she's a game changer.
With a degree in Electronics and a PhD in Physics from Cambridge University; she founded the award winning lab Novalia to explore the space where traditional print and conventional electronics converge, and has been living in that world ever since.
Some people expect the future to look like the film Minority Report, but Dr Kate Stone believes the opposite - she wants to infuse our current analogue world with electronics so that everything looks like it always has.... except that it can come alive through interaction. Imagine a world where a teenager’s bedroom poster comes to life with the launch of a new album, or an LP that enables you to DJ from the actual record sleeve itself, or a notebook that actually plays musical notes? This is the world Dr Kate Stone is creating - by adding 'digital soul' to everyday flat surfaces that we take for granted, she is changing the world as we know it.
Using her patented interactive print Dr Kate Stone is adding interaction and capacitive touch to everything from hats and mandalas through to packaging and books - and connecting them to the internet, she is creating a new frontier for traditional industries that we already know and love, and who until now have been locked out of the technology age.
Vicki TanSenior Product Designer at HeadspaceThe secrets data won't tell you
It’s become standard to lean on quantitative, experiment-driven design, especially when decisions must be made quickly and with very little time and resources. But this method often only reveals surface-level themes and not much about your users’ true intentions. In this Headspace onboarding case study, Vicki will walk you through how we learned to design using intuition, blending science and design research to create a solution that met our users’ needs.
Vicki Tan
Vicki is a Senior Product Designer at Headspace, creating experiences to guide new users towards a healthy meditation practice. Previously, she was at Lyft, optimizing the passenger ride experience, and at Google, designing tools for reducing bias and predicting outcomes. Prior to Google, Vicki was at Stanford's School of Medicine coordinating research studies in Pediatric Oncology. She holds a degree in Behavioral Psychology from the University of California, San Diego.
Bianca Berning Font engineer and type designer at Dalton MaagThe Potential of Variable Fonts
We are still figuring out how reading on screen can be improved. There is no set of typographic rules that will assist us, we know print typography rules can't be applied directly to the web, so how do we improve our reader's experience?
One OpenType variable font file can contain the equivalent of multiple individual fonts and allows for a near infinite range of font styles, with smooth interpolation between weights, width and other design axes. With my presentation I want to answer the following questions: Why has typography been neglected on the web? What is the difference between a static and a variable font? What are the web performance benefits of variable fonts in comparison to static fonts? Why should designers and typographers care about a range of font styles? How can variable fonts improve the user experience?
Bianca Berning
Bianca is a font engineer and type designer and heads up the Skills and Process department for font foundry Dalton Maag. She is an active member of Alphabettes, ATypI and the Unicode Consortium; and she coordinates a mentorship program with the aim to help students and professional newcomers immerse themselves in the industry.
Noah LevinDesign Manager at FigmaDesigning in the Open: Shedding the fear of collaboration, and embracing feedback earlier in the design process.
Great ideas can come from anywhere. And getting those ideas into the world takes much more than just craft. A huge part of the job of a designer is frequent communication and collaboration. Yet many companies operate design teams in silos, hoarding great ideas behind the walls of the sacred design studio and exposing them only after they feel polished and ready. When revealed to the broader team, they often discover the ideas to be fraught with engineering challenges, confused stakeholders, and missed goals.
How might we explore sharing ideas earlier in the design process? How do we balance the importance of individual focus for deep work, and the need to gather broad feedback to let the best ideas develop and flourish? How can we adopt healthier collaboration styles during critique?
This talk examines the idea of openness during the design process, and how that process is changing with new technology to allow people to appropriately diverge, converge, and ship great work.
Noah Levin
Noah is the Design Manager at Figma, where he gets to meet with design teams of all shapes and sizes to build better tools for them. Before that he led the design team at ClassPass in NYC, and the iOS Search team at Google in Mountain View. He also spent some time teaching designers to code as an advisor at Framer, and building a digital assistant for Astronauts at NASA. He studied Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon and is a Pittsburgh native who’s convinced it’s the most underrated city in the world.
Morgane SantosAugmented Reality at MapboxFrom 2D to 3D: How Web Designers Can Get Started in AR/VR
AR/VR/3D design is becoming ever more relevant in tech, but making the transition from web/mobile design can be daunting - as I recently learned when I made the switch myself! In this talk I’ll cover what AR/VR/3D design actually is, what skills designers need to know (like 3D modeling, Unity development, and more), and how to learn them. You’ll walk away with a clear idea of how to develop all the skills you need to take part in this exciting field.
Morgane Santos
Morgane is an AR developer at Mapbox and an indie game designer. She loves making cool things with computers and has been logged on since the 90s.
Danger DaveArtist at Cool Shit How to quit your day job, dump your partner and make it as an artist. The highs and lows of taking risks and following your calling
Danger Dave
Hungry Castle is the Internet in real life. They actively work to make Cool Shit playful, public, polarizing and pop. The goal of the fashion and art studio has always been to make big, playful things of cultural impact and use design thinking in a way that truly engages people.
They're the creators of MR POOPIE - a giant inflatable poop emoji that makes icecream, LASER CAT - an epic cat that projects art through its laser beam eyes and LIONEL RICHIE'S HEAD - a giant inflatable sculpture of Lionel Richie's Head, just to name a few of their art pieces. Their work has been exhibited in New York, Miami Beach, London and Paris.
Hosts
Daniel MontanoDesign Lead at More Digital Studios
Daniel Montano, originally from London - England, spent many years in the entertainment industry working as an actor, dancer, choreographer & singer before making the leap to art direction & design. After a few years working in traditional media his interests moved towards digital design and he is currently working as Design Lead at More Digital Studios in Stockholm while spending his evenings as co-host of the Designers in Stockholm podcast. Outside of design & all things digital his heart beats for his daughter & wife.
Unn SwanströmUser Experience Designer at Doberman
Unn is co-organiser of Designers in Stockholm meet-up and a podcast host of the digital design podcast with the same name. Was IT Woman of the Year 2015. During the day Unn is a User Experience Designer at the design firm Doberman who firmly believes that life can be made better with technology. Loves exploring how to make the internet a more interesting and worthwhile place (Currently the main hypothesis is to design services for humans and to post lost of pictures of her kitten Arnold).
