My SXSW — Design Talks!
1 0f 3 articles focusing on design, technology and music.
Experiencing my first ever SXSW was — well, an experience and then some. However, before all the exciting entertainment and randomness, there was an exceptionally solid set of insightful, thought provoking and educational talks, discussions and presentations about design, tech and the future of such things. I won’t give you a play by play, as that would start with me missing my first two talks due to having ZERO clue what the hell was going on! Instead, Il pull out some of the major topics and insights I took from the talks I attended.
Design thinking, Spatial Design and Design Systems
Three topics that are so close to everything we have set up to do here at layers, and ones that match my personal preferred approach to design and ideation.
Design Thinking
First off, the talk Leading for a Culture of Innovation & Creativity by IDEO Business Designer, David Aycan was as insightful as you can get with regards to problem solving for businesses and it’s philosophies.
Reviewing the importance of the principles IDEO is built on such as;
Purpose, Looking Out, Observe, Collaboration, Empowerment, Experimentation plus a few more. The review of these principles and why they are implemented is something that I have read about before, and it’s why we work hard at Layers to encourage many of these in the work we do. However, David took it a step further, with a wealth of data to work from demonstrating the realities of following such principles. Stats like
Collaboration: Collaborate with teams across functions daily = +38% Success rate
The results of IDEO’s work speak for themselves and they have an abundance of examples online you can search for. The most exciting and possibly world changing project to me however — was the new Voting system developed with LA to increase their voter turn out in the next American election.
The modular system takes into consideration the needs of deaf / hard of hearing, the blind or visually impaired and the various types of spaces these pods need to be deployed too. By speaking to real users, and hearing their stories, IDEO has created something that works for everyone.
More excitingly, they realised that people are inspired to vote after hearing a speech or talk — by creating an app that allows users to have pre registered, they can load in their vote before poling day, and have the app send their vote on the day automatically. For me, this changes everything. You can engage the young, the old, those who struggle to get time off work to go vote, those who are even close to being disillusioned to the point they don’t see the benefit in voting. With a system this accessible, why not vote?
It’s a shame it’s such a long time away to see how this will affect things, but perhaps other states and our own country could adopt this method before the next elections…
Spatial Design
Sometimes, you just need a phrase to describe what it is your trying to explain to people. We have been searching for a phrase that sums up what we talk about when we try to encourage better thinking around website design. Turns out there is one, it’s called Spatial Design, Trista Yard delivered a great talk on why it’s important ‘Evolving Responsive with Spatial Design. I recommend you watch it.
The follow up questions and answers, voluntarily put on by Trista, afterwards were almost as insightful as the talk itself.
What I took away from this is that people are still more worried about data, load on the server, ROI, the tried and tested success of standard patterns (dark patterns?) which is so frustrating, as this leads to stale, repetitive experiences.
At Layers we want to design great brand experiences online, not the same old boxy sites for everyone.
Trista showed some great examples of not only her own work and that of Code & Theory — who’s website takes you an interactive journey of what makes them tick. Overall the talk was refreshing and revitalising to someone who has been pushing these principles themselves.
Highly recommend checking Trista out on Twitter and getting to her next talk.
UPDATE: You an now watch the talk yourself! :)
Design Systems
Finally, and this was actually my final design talk, we have the AWESOM, hilarious and genuine mavericks of design, Steve Aoki and David Guetta* from SNASK!.
This was just the perfect way to end the design talks for me. It was one of the last talks on one of the last days for Design and, even thought it was an encore, they nailed it. The crowd were in tears of laughter (well except the one or two who left pretty quick when they seemed to be against the fun, but it was still a full house). These guys are just great they love what they do and live by what they believe in. That combined with their undeniable talent has seen them craft a business that is world-renowned and lets them live the graphic designers dream of finally doing only the work they love.
They had some pearls of wisdom hidden in their very fun filled talk, some of which are stolen from other people, which they were happy to share, one that was fitting for the general ethos of SXSW in my opinion:
Really, there’s not much point in me going into their talk, go check them out, see their site, and watch some of their brand videos. This, from their talk, was one of my faves. How do you make a cool video for the coolest of cool sneaker stores? Make an uncool one!
Be ROCKSTARS! — SNASK!
Finally, and this was actually my final design talk, we have the AWESOM, hilarious and genuine mavericks of design, Steve Aoki and David Guetta* from SNASK!.
This was just the perfect way to end the design talks for me. It was one of the last talks on one of the last days for Design and, even thought it was an encore, they nailed it. The crowd were in tears of laughter (well except the one or two who left pretty quick when they seemed to be against the fun, but it was still a full house). These guys are just great, they love what they do and live by what they believe in. That combined with their un deniable talent has seen them craft a business that is world renowned and sees them live the graphic designers dream of finally doing only the work they love.
They had some pearls of wisdom hidden in their very fun filled talk, some of which are stoled from other people, which they were happy to share, one that was fitting for the general ethos of SXSW in my opinion:
Really, theres not much point in me going into their talk, go check them out, see their site, and watch some of their brand videos. This, from their talk, was one of my faves. How do you make a cool video for the coolest of cool sneaker stores? Make an uncool one!
There’s so much more from SXSW, I hope to get my write up on what I took from the Tech and innovation next, Machine learning and Ai huge talking points that seemed ingrained into many talks.
