Cultivating community: Building powerful relationships by communicating with empathy

One of our most valuable commodities as humans is our ability to build relationships – both personally and professionally. And the key to any successful relationship is empathy: being able to understand someone, connect with someone and view the world through their eyes. The problem is that the empathy needed to cultivate relationships, foster collaboration and build strong communities is often times lacking, especially when we are around people who are different from us. If empathy is the tie that binds us, then vulnerability is the thread that holds that rope together.

It’s time to change the status quo in tech. Let’s explore the impact of empathy on communities. We’ll discuss how communication plays a role in building successful relationships; how empathy fosters highly collaborative teams; and finally we’ll talk about true accessibility. Why? Because innovation is at it’s best when it’s inclusive. And to be inclusive, you must be empathetic.

Design Systems: Real Talk

Design systems have been around for ages; you can see a little bit into the history of them as brand systems and graphic standards manuals of the past are resurfacing as collectibles today.

However, in today’s modern web and software design industry, there is no denying that design systems are so hot right now. People are making them, sharing them, writing about them, and talking about them… even forming entire teams dedicated to working on them. It has been exciting to see the traction they are gaining, and how far they have come through process, automation, and tooling.

It truly can be a dream product: a design system that scales across many enterprise products, many devices and platforms, and is open source to a larger developer community. What a fun challenge for systems-minded designers and developers. And starting out, you have a pretty good idea of what the end result will be.

But at this scale, there is no end result. There are interesting challenges you will face along the way: internal politics, design changes, business decisions, configuration, deprecation strategies, naming, adoption, onboarding, support, training, governance, resistance… There are implementations and then undoing of those implementations. Enterprise design systems aren’t easy.

But don’t let this intimidate you. There are always lessons to be learned and shared. And we as an industry are constantly iterating and improving on our processes. We’re all in this together.

In this session, Jina, a design systems designer, fan, and advocate — and who was Lead Designer on the Salesforce Lightning Design System — will share some stories and insights into the lessons she has learned designing one of the largest design systems in the industry.

Dodging bullets – Microservices for fewer sleepless nights

Recent years have seen a shift in technical architectures. Building complex services for the web used to be just that – complex. Projects might have demanded a broad range of specialist skills which could stretch even the fullest of full-stack developers. These days we have a growing number of options for how we design, build and maintain the systems which keep our web sites and applications alive.

This talk will look at ways to make use of readily available microservices to unlock functionality​ and opportunity in otherwise simple technical stacks. We’ll talk about the benefits in keeping your stack simple, and in leaning on the expertise of others.

Hacking the Visual Norm

There are so many visualisation tools out there today, most with a pre-made set of charts. But trying to wrangle your data to fit (uncomfortably) into the default charts is not the right mindset. Adjust the visual to your data, not the other way around. You don’t necessarily have to be a code wizard to let your creativity run free. Even with the defaults, you can become creative by using them in a different way, combining layouts or chart types to create something new, or even changing small pieces of code from existing visualisation frameworks.

During this talk Nadieh will take you through several of her data visualisation projects, both from the business environment of her day job and the experiments made in her evenings. Hopefully, by the end you’ll want to step outside of your “visualisation” comfort zone and create (custom) charts that best display the insights in the data.

Peace, Hellfire & Outer Space

Seb Lester charts his life in letters from student days to working for some of the biggest companies in the world to current art and design projects. The presentation includes a section on designing a logo for a NASA space mission. Seb will also be speaking about how he ended up with approaching two million followers on social media.

10 things I have learned after art school

Being a freelance creative is pretty much about making mistakes and learn from it… repeat, repeat, repeat. There are definitely mistakes each of us have to make, and there are also ones that others made for you so you don’t have to.

Among all the things I learned in 15 years, I narrowed them to 10 most important things to live by, and I would love to share that with you. And oh, because you probably don’t know what illustrators do, so I share a bit of that as well.