Andrew Schmidt, UX Writer from Slack

Timo is responsible for the idea, vision, look & feel as well as the realization of new, innovative digital products for kids. He is leading a team of award-winning artists, developers, and sound designers, driving them crazy with weird stickman mock-ups and home recorded humming choirs. In this episode he talks about the game SHINE and what to consider when attacking a t-Rex with a torchlight. For more information about Design Matters’ talks, conventions, and events, visit designmatters.io.

Alongside being a senior product designer at Behance, Jeannie Huang is a botanical artist and photographer. In her talk, she encouraged her audience to sit with the uncomfortability of being bored, with the intention of encouraging creative growth. A firm believer that boredom is necessary, even crucial for creative work. She gives practical suggestions to improve creativity, such as consciously avoiding multi-tasking, focusing on one thing at a time for a given period. Jeannie encourages scheduling in a time to just be, so that you can find value and empathy in the spaces between doing. For more information about Design Matters’ talks, conventions, and events, visit designmatters.io.

Jenny Wen is a Product Designer at Figma who focuses on improving the collaborative experience of designers and their counterparts throughout the design process. Designers are generally pretty familiar with the idea of “designing openly” and sharing a design work with teammates. Open design today is often an illusion of “open design,” meaning there are still ways and means to hide behind a screen. In this episode, Jenny explores the ways in which Figma embraces open design, to redefine the future of the design industry. For more information about Design Matters’ talks, conventions, and events, visit designmatters.io.

Andreas Refsgaard is an artist and creative coder based in Copenhagen. He uses algorithms and machine learning to make unconventional connections between inputs and outputs. He describes how machine learning has become an integrated part of the design practice. By enabling people to train their own unique controls for a system, the creative power shifts from the designer of the system to the person interacting with it. Through Anrdreas’ innovative way of creating by machine learning, people can play music using only eye movement and facial gestures, control games by making silly sounds, transform drawings of musical instruments on paper into real compositions, and train algorithms to decide what is funny, funky or boring.For more information about Design Matters’ talks, conventions, and events, visit designmatters.io.

“The way it looks and the way it reads,” these are two halves of a whole. Designers often spend significant amounts of time thinking about layout, presentation, and interactions. But there is another fundamental element to consider: writing. In this talk, Andrew looks at how storytelling, prose, and a conversational approach to design can elevate a designer’s work as a whole, providing practical tactics to solve design problems through UX writing techniques. Language truly has the power to determine the way our design work feels and functions.For more information about Design Matters’ talks, conventions, and events, visit designmatters.io.