Are we really still talking about collaboration tools and handoffs? Instead, let’s talk about product development and the fundamental principles of web design. And how to use Figma in a way so you can forget about the perfect handoff and work together!

Christine will also give a workshop on Figma too!

Unfortunately, even charts from major news media outlets, universities and high-tech companies often leave readers confused, unmoved, or misled. Why? Well, creating clear, compelling, engaging charts requires a wider variety of skills than many people realize.

In this eye-opening talk, globally recognized instructor and best-selling author Nick Desbarats will reveal the surprisingly wide array of skills that are required to create truly great charts.

Nick will also give a workshop on Practical Charts too!

A practitioner’s guide to Zenko Mapping, a framework that separates and examines the interplay between the social and material dimensions of a design process. With client examples drawn from over the last decade of work, and a new systemic version which creates a template for a holistic Strategic Design process, this talk will also (trigger warning) feature quite a lot about gardens.

Uncover your unique value and forge your own path

Jason will unveil the latest visual frameworks he has been developing and using over the past 19 years. Helping design teams, leaders and designers to reflect on their career, understand themselves better, define their unique profile and sharpen the focus of their future path.

Discover how these frameworks can help you gain a broader understanding of your capabilities as a designer, leader, and manager, and enhance team cohesion and strengthen individual identity within your organisation.

Join Australian artist Gemma O’Brien for a step-by-step look at her process of creating lettering for large-scale murals.

From collecting inspiration, sketching by hand, colouring on the iPad Pro, to painting the final piece, Gemma will share insights and tips on how she takes her designs off the page and into a physical space.

With live demos in analogue and digital, this session is perfect for designers who want to escape the screen and try their hand at calligraphy, lettering, and painting.

Join Pablo Stanley, CEO of Lummi and Musho, as he shares his expertise in generating not only great and beautiful images but also diverse and inclusive ones using AI. In this talk, Pablo will provide practical tips on how to structure prompts to create images that are on-brand, follow a specific style, look natural and realistic, and authentically represent diversity.

He'll be giving a workshop on Master UI Design.

Mysteries are the threads that weave the fabric of life.

In this increasingly remote world, meaningful collaboration can feel more out of reach than ever. Everyone’s calendar is packed with meetings, but often no productive collaboration.

“Facilitation” doesn’t always mean a big, pre-planned workshop. Dee will share practical facilitation tools & techniques to give you low-prep, low-pressure ways for you and your team to sidestep the default productivity traps, gain clarity, and boost your design workflow.

Making design system features is exciting. But what about managing assignments, tracking tasks, and discussing status? The momentum of emergent tokens and rapid Figma and code prototypes gives way to the dulling rigor of quality and collaboration across designers and developers wanting to operate independently. In order to earn trust and reach success, design systems need to sweat the details together. Managing the work need not be so daunting and tedious.

In this talk, Nathan will demonstrate the process he’s installed and evolved across the design system teams he’s led over the past ten years. Using tools like Asana and Jira, he’ll demonstrate how to organize design system work, record scope, assign and track tasks, and release features over time. Workflow challenges – repetitive reviews, quick tasks amid formal workflows, when to discuss requests – will season the tour. Whether you are a system practitioner considering how you fit or a manager refining a practice, you’ll leave inspired to refine the speed, precision and clarity of your design system process.

Nathan will also give a workshop on Design System Planning and Process.

Language models feel like squishy, alien minds we've organically grown inside a GPU cluster. They are unlike any of our existing computational tools. They're predictably unpredictable and break many of our pre-conceived notions of how computers work. How are we supposed to design with these messy, unwieldy, Shoggoth-like creatures?

In her talk, Maggie will cover how to balance squish and structure, why compositionally matters, and explore the potential of treating models as small, single-purpose reasoning engines.

Wise works almost everywhere. 170 countries, 50 currencies, one account. But how do you design for everyone, everywhere? How do you create a product that whoever you are, wherever you go, it looks, sounds and works the same?

In this talk, Cameron will give a behind-the-scenes look at how Wise created a design system that's made for the world.

It’s inevitable that AI will transform almost every aspect of our work. We are currently experiencing a technological revolution where disruption in technology often precedes societal changes. This of course means demands from designers are shifting too, as business and industry is continually disrupted. But like all things, in order to survive, designers must adapt to these new realities.

The truth is that many design discussions are still dominated by outdated thinking and concepts from over a decade ago. And with the breakneck pace of technology and evolving workplace dynamics, we risk being left out of the rooms where the transformative decisions are being made. Now that companies are becoming more focused on AI, designers must reassess their current role within companies and advocate for greater access and influence.

This talk is about reimagining the role of design in business and industry as we enter into a new era where everything exists within an AI sphere of influence. We will first cover some traditional constructs that have limited the potential of designers for decades, before ending with methods and tools to help you and your team develop new paradigms in which to operate, to leverage creativity in a way that fosters leadership and makes an impact.