Time + Creativity

Time and creativity are inextricably intertwined. The more time you make available to ‘prime the brain’, the greater the range of potential creative outcomes you’ll be sure to enjoy. In short, time and creativity go hand-in-hand.

In this talk, Christopher Murphy explores strategies for maximising the time you have available to improve your creativity, by: embracing planned procrastination; shaving yaks; and allowing yourself the luxury of working on ‘distractions’, when you should really be focused on the task at hand.

Christopher will explore strategies that can double or even triple your time, if you just let your hair down and let go a little. True to his – procrastinating – word, he’ll be working on the talk right up until the moment he goes on stage.

Advice from a young designer to younger designers

You have just set foot at your first design job. There, you begin realizing that designing on the job requires a lot more skills than just in typography and HTML/CSS. How do you effectively communicate your work to non-design colleagues? What steps must you take to grow internally? Most of all, how do you even get noticed in your company? After three and a half years of working at TED as my first job out of college, I’m here to share with you hard-learned career lessons that we all wish someone would have told us earlier. This talk will hopefully prevent you from flailing around aimlessly for too long like I once did as a young designer.

An Abusive Relationship with AngularJS - About the Security Adventures with the "Super-Hero" Framework

Some voices claim that "Angular is what HTML would have been if it had been designed for building web applications". While this statement may or may not be true, is certainly accounts as one of the bolder ones a JavaScript web framework can ever issue. And where boldness is glistening like a German Bratwurst sausage in the evening sun, a critical review from a grumpy old security person shouldn’t be too far away.

This talk will have a stern, very stern look at AngularJS in particular and shed light on the security aspects of this ever-popular tool. Did the super-hero framework do everything right and follow its own super-heroic principles? Does AngularJS increase or rather decrease the attack surface of a web application? How does AngularJS play along with the Content Security Policy, and was it a good idea to combine this kind of security with futuristic feature creep? And what about AngularJS version 2.0? Beware that we won’t stop at glancing at the code itself, investigating security best practices, and verifying compatibility and other common things that contribute to robust security (or lack thereof).

We will cross the moral border and see if the AngularJS team could notice rogue bug tickets. A pivotal question that everyone is wondering about is: Have they successfully kept evil minds like yours truly speaker here from introducing new security bugs into the code base? This talk is a reckoning with a modern JavaScript framework that promises a lot and keeps even more, not necessarily for the best for developers and users. We will conclude in deriving a general lesson learnt and hopefully agree that progress doesn't invariably mean an enhancement.

Unreal.js

Beyond the web, people are discovering strange and exciting uses of Javascript.

In 2015 Nako Sung of NCSoft created a plugin called Unreal.js which allows Javascript to be run inside a high performance game engine for rapid prototyping.

In this presentation, Michael chronicles his journey building a game in WebGL which led to using Javascript to interface with Unreal Engine, and offer ideas on taking your front-end development skills to unexpected places.

Designing Socially Impactful Digital Experiences

Countless people in technology want to use their skills to help others. However, creating a digital product that improves society is harder than it sounds. The successful use of technology in new contexts requires more research, testing, and time than most would like to admit. Countless social good hackathons have been organized, yet many products created during these events fail to become anything more than a mention in a recap article.

In this talk, Catt will describe her process of creating SenseU, a mobile sex education game that utilizes a popular form of communication: instant messaging. Using her project as a case study, she will highlight ways that the current state of designing for social good can be improved. Attendees will learn ways that technology can successfully help others as well as tips for launching an interactive experience created for social good.

Typography on the web is just like other typography only much more interesting

There has been some discussions in the web community recently about a new definition of typography and a call for establishing typographic rules for the web. But do we really need that? Is the web such an inherently different medium that it needs its own design guidelines or are there more similarities across media and products than we think? After all, what we usually do with text is essentially the same regardless of its container: we skip it or we read it. What aids the function of the text in analog and digital products, and where can “print” and web designers learn from each other?

The Reinvention of Normal

Ideas are everywhere, we just need to look closer to find them. This talk is a fast paced journey through the imagination of Dominic Wilcox revealing the wide range of methods he uses to be prolifically creative. From experimentation and risk taking to speed creating and time sitting in his tree branch desk, the story of Dominic's life and work will inspire, surprise and delight.