Speakers
Take a look at our wonderful speakers for SmashingConf Freiburg 2018.
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Vitaly Friedman
Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. When he is not writing or speaking at a conference, he’s most probably running front-end/UX workshops and webinars. He loves solving complex UX, front-end and performance problems.
- On the web
- https://smashingmagazine.com
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Andrea Drugay
Andrea Drugay is a UX Writing Manager at Dropbox. She’s spent many years writing and editing for various areas in tech, including SaaS, biometrics, social media networks, and ecommerce. She’s an ex-Googler, speaker and panelist for design and writing events including AIGA and IoT World, writing workshop coordinator, and semi-regular blogger. She’s passionate about creating clear and positive user experiences with her words, and she loves to help people create the best possible copy they can write. Andrea has a BA in Communication and an MFA in Creative Writing.
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Craig Mod
Craig is a digital savant in love with the analogue. In code, design, and photography, but mostly through his writing, he explores our collective struggle to find focus in a world of perpetual distraction. He lives a quiet life in a seaside town south of Tokyo – sometimes escaping to remote writing retreats around the US – where he revels in his various creative outlets while hidden from the public eye. When he’s ready, he emerges from hibernation with thought-provoking, introspective essays, books, and talks that examine the meaning of a connected life.
- Talk
- Books, Walking, and the Ethics of Scale
- On the web
- https://craigmod.com
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Hannah Pileggi
Hannah Pileggi is the experience research lead at Airbnb.
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Ian Feather
Ian leads the front end infrastructure team at BuzzFeed working on performance, testing, automation and resilience. He is particularly fond of working on problems relating to scale: both of sites and of teams.
His background is in Front End Web Development and it’s only in recent years that he has stepped away from feature development to focus on Front End Infrastructure. He is a big fan of continuous delivery and creating a safe environment to push code quickly and easily. Prior to BuzzFeed he worked for Schibsted Media, Lonely Planet and Burberry.
- Talk
- Building Resilient Front-end Systems
- On the web
- https://ianfeather.co.uk
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Josh Clark
Josh Clark is a UX design leader who helps organizations build products for what's next. He is founder of Big Medium, a New York design studio specializing in future-friendly interfaces for artificial intelligence, connected devices, and responsive websites. His clients include Samsung, United Airlines, ExxonMobil, About.com, O’Reilly Media, and many others. Josh has written several books, including Designing for Touch and Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps. He speaks around the world about what’s next for digital interfaces.
Before the internet swallowed him up, Josh was a producer of national PBS programs at Boston’s WGBH. He shared his three words of Russian with Mikhail Gorbachev, strolled the ranch with Nancy Reagan, hobnobbed with Rockefellers, and wrote trivia questions for a primetime game show. In 1996, he created the popular “Couch-to-5K” (C25K) running schedule, which has helped millions of skeptical would-be exercisers take up jogging. (His motto is the same for fitness as it is for software user experience: no pain, no pain.)
- Talk
- Design in the Era of the Algorithm
- On the web
- https://bigmedium.com
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Lightning Sessions
Eight lightning talks, just after lunch. Only four minutes, one topic, lightning fast. Meet our Lightning Session speakers and give them a warm round of applause!
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Morten Rand-Hendriksen
Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a designer, developer, educator, and open-source advocate known for his engaging and insightful online courses at LinkedIn Learning, provocative TikTok videos, and talks on design, development, and tech ethics. He also sporadically teaches Interaction Design at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
He consistently promotes the importance of empathy, ethics, and accessibility in the design and development of digital products. Morten is a leading voice on the societal impact of internet and AI technologies, exploring the ethical implications and potential consequences that these advancements have on our lives. Through his research, writing, and public speaking engagements, he encourages thoughtful discussions on how to build a more equitable and sustainable digital future for all, emphasizing the need for a dignity- and capability-centered approach in the rapidly evolving tech landscape.
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Seb Lee-Delisle
Seb Lee-Delisle is a digital artist and speaker who uses computers to engage with people and inspire them.
As an artist, he likes to make interesting things from code that encourage interaction and playfulness from the public. Notable projects include Lunar Trails, featuring a 3m wide drawing machine, and PixelPyros, the Arts Council funded digital fireworks display that toured nationwide in 2013.
As a speaker he demystifies programming and explores its artistic possibilities. His presentations and workshops enable artists to overcome their fear of code and encourage programmers of all backgrounds to be more creative and imaginative.
His recent work Laser Light Synths won the 2016 Lumen Interactive Prize. He won 3 Microsoft awards in 2013, and he was Technical Director on Big and Small, the BBC project that won a BAFTA in 2009.
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Tammy Everts
Tammy has spent the past two decades studying how people use the web. Her book Time Is Money: The Business Value of Web Performance (O’Reilly) is a data-driven exploration of the intersection between performance, user experience, and business.
Tammy is Chief Experience Officer at SpeedCurve, where she helps companies understand how visitors use their websites. She is a frequent conference speaker, co-curator of WPO stats, and co-chair of the annual performance.now() conference.
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Trine Falbe
Trine has worked with UX for 20 years. She is dedicated to ethical design and innovation, and currently works as Head of Innovation at Smart Academy in Denmark, alongside building digital products as an entrepreneur. She’s written two books: White Hat UX (2017) and The Ethical Design Handbook (2020)
- Talk
- Designing for Kids is not a Game
- On the web
- https://trinefalbe.com
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Chui Chui Tan
Chui Chui started her UX career more than a decade ago, working with organisations such as Spotify, Marriott, BBC, Google and Clarks, from initial research to design to develop multi-channel international strategies. She has founded Beyō Global, a consultancy which helps companies use market, user behavioural and cultural insights to design a better product and service for their customers (domestic and internationally). Chui Chui is also the author of the book International User Research, the editor at Smashing Magazine and a regular international speaker.
- Talk
- Designing for Global Audiences
- On the web
- https://beyo.global
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Yoav Weiss
Yoav Weiss has been working on mobile web performance for longer than he cares to admit, on the server side as well as in browsers. He now works as part of Google Chrome developer relations team, helping to fix web performance once and for all.
He takes image bloat on the web as a personal insult, which is why he joined the Responsive Images Community Group and implemented the various responsive images features in Blink and WebKit. That was his gateway drug into the wonderfully complex world of browsers and standards.
When he’s not writing code, he’s probably slapping his bass, mowing the lawn in the French countryside, or playing board games with his family.
- Talk
- Taking Back Control Over Third-party Content
- On the web
- https://blog.yoav.ws
