Program

Welcome to Design Matters!

Ingrid will open the conference with a talk about new trends and movements in digital design.

She will also introduce the themes of the conference:
– Creative Empowerment
– The designer’s role
– Scandinavian design Philosophy

Ingrid is Founder of Design Matters and Usable Machine, a UX studio based in Copenhagen.

Embrace Failure

Using examples from history, biology and the Indian culture of ‘jugaad’, Rahul talks about failing smart and often.

He’ll draw from experiences at Volvo and Spotify and talk about, how we as designers need to focus on learning cheaply through our process and make new mistakes to enable a culture of success.

Rahul is head of UX & Research at Volvo Cars Labs, where he invents desirable products that don’t exist yet. Previously, he worked as a Design Manager at Spotify

Hello, Design

Shun will talk about how looking back at the magnificent Japanese design traditions of the past can help digital designers today to a higher sense of creative empowerment.

He will discuss the current challenges for Japanese designers, and how to overcome these using design thinking.

Shun is co-founder of Any LLc and was previously Design Director at IDEO. He wrote the book ‘Hello, Design’, where he states that Design is for everyone, a discipline everyone can master by following the right methods.

Empathy in Design

In this workshop, Julie will share methods on how to gain valuable insights about the end-users, and utilize empathy in order to create effective products that speak to the user.

Julie is a UX designer at Usable Machine, where she creates simple, beautiful designs for complex problems.

User research and gaining empathy for users is key for Julie. Thus, she is always updated on the latest, playful and effective research methods.

Writing for Humans: making software with a heart

Playfulness! Empathy! Delight! We’re all trying to build software that connects with our audience, but how can we do that in a way that feels genuine?
In this workshop, we’ll tackle exactly that. First we’ll learn to chart a user’s emotional journey — their highs, lows, and in-betweens. Then we’ll practice writing for those emotions, and making the most of each opportunity to connect. Bring a pencil, and come ready to write.

Andrew is a Senior Product Writer at Slack. He brings human language to the software we use every day.

From prototypes to luxury products

Rapid iterations and prototyping are a fundamental part of designing the beautifully crafted, luxury audio products that Bang & Olufsen is known for.

Instead of long meetings, Michael and his team start out by trying different ideas, exploring as many options as possible and thereby learning much faster.

In this talk, Michael will explain the design process that is used at Bang & Olufsen, show examples of simple prototypes that address complex problems, and share tips about how teams of all sizes can bring this form of rapid prototyping into their work life. Iterating at speed can become your superpower too!

Redesigning Design

What might it look like to think of Design itself as a product, and fundamentally redesign it? This is the journey Figma is currently embarking.

This talk shares how Figma is thinking about the problem, and how they expect the process and role of Design to evolve.

Throughout, he’ll be drawing parallels to some of his own experiences with large-scale redesigns of products that range from Uber to YouTube to Hotmail.

Back to Design

Design is no longer purely about creating beautiful outcomes. Today it is increasingly about other things, such as creating tools to help others design, construct methods that allow different teams to work together, come up with principles that guide the business to be more humanity-centric, and outline concepts that give a vision to our future.

In this talk, Kay will talk about how she creates service design for future scenarios using collaborative methods and processes.

Kay is a multidisciplinary designer at Designit, an international agency with offices in Copenhagen and Tokyo.

Danish design philosophy: Designing for change

In the new sustainability era, companies are challenged to find ways to collaborate across all divisions to ensure that green and social ambitions are transformed into concrete actions.

At its best, design can drive these processes. When done right, brand identity is not just a statement of what you believe in and where you’re heading, but also a process that creates unity and change inside the company.

Philip’s talk will demonstrate how a Danish design philosophy helps to assist world-leading brands from Denmark and Japan to catalyze change.

Creative strategy

Michelle Morrison’s has been focusing on creative strategy and operations. She currently works as a Design Program Manager at Dropbox. Previously she worked for Facebook, Intercom, Square and IDEO.org. She also runs Designers + Geeks, San Francisco’s largest design community and lecture series.

Prototyping Workshop

In this workshop, Michael will share the design process of Bang & Olufsen and make everyone participate in rapid iterations and hands-on prototyping.

He will challenge the participants with typical consumer problems related to audio products, and make sure everyone works hard in this super-fast, fun and creative session!

Michael has worked across different industries designing computer games for Disney and Hasbro, led UX efforts, build his own agency and is currently heading up early explorations for new products at Bang & Olufsen.

Designing together

In this workshop, we’ll dive deep into how hyper collaborative tools can benefit teamwork and elevate design work as a whole.

Yuhki is the VP of Product at Figma. Before joining Figma, he was at Uber for over 4 years, where he led the redesign of both the rider and driver apps.

Design. Play. Fall in Love

David will share the story on how the BBC is using play to empower the design team and create a collaborative culture that embraces creativity. He will show practical examples of how design teams can use play to embed learning and strategic goals into their work.

He will also talk about delight in digital design: How the internet has exposed the mechanics of delight, yet is enabling designers to build new relationships with their clientele based on love and trust.

David works the BBC as Creative Director of UX design and has recently become the Principal for Visual Design and Branding.

Writing for Buttons: how language can elevate your work

Done well, UX writing can bring both approachability and humanity to even the most technical software. So let’s do it well.

In a quick 30 minutes, we’ll do a top-to-toes study of UX writing. It all starts with microcopy — and some helpful rules for writing it — before we zoom out to cover crafting user flows, thinking conversationally, and connecting with your audience.

Come for the GIFs, stay for the hard-earned insights. Of both there are many.

Andrew is a Senior Product Writer at Slack.