Interview with Liza Kindred

Founder, Mindful Technology

This year we’re celebrating 10 years of UX London! In the run up to our special anniversary conference, we caught up with Liza Kindred to hear her thoughts on how technology has evolved over the past decade, and how it can evolve in the future.

UX London was founded a decade ago. Ten years later, where has technology landed us?

Ten years ago, many of us were thinking of technology as the solution to many problems; we believed that automation and digitization could build bridges, allow greater access to resources, make our lives easier, and carry us into a brighter future.

Today, we see very clearly the impact that technological innovation has had. Some of these changes are clearly for the better: old business models and assumptions have been updated, the narrowing digital divide has given more people access to education and opportunity, and we can accomplish a myriad of tasks with the touch of a proverbial button.

It hasn’t all been good, though. We’ve seen elections hacked, hate speech disseminated more widely than ever before, and an unchecked focus on apps that make lives easier for people who already had relatively easy lives to begin with. We’ve seen corporations behaving terribly with our personal data, and have homes and cars that can be hacked from half a world away.

And so: what’s happening today is that we are seeing the beginning of a backlash against the unquestioned dominance of “tech for tech’s sake”. When we look up from our phones and see the zombies around us; when we look at the kind of lives we really want to lead, and when we take an honest look at what we’re building, we are left with a clearer picture of the pros and cons of what we’ve built.

Within this clarity is enormous opportunity. The 10th anniversary of UX London offers up the perfect time to take a pause: a time to reflect, to re-evaluate, and to reinvigorate ourselves with fresh ideas and optimism about how we, as designers, can make everyday choices in our work that can help build the world we want to live in, today.

I’m so excited to share the Mindful Technolgy ethos and strategies through my talk and workshop. The #mindfultech values that I’ve developed are specifically designed to empower you to make decisions that are good for business, but also good for the world. In ten years, I hope we’ll all look back and feel proud of the decisions we’ve made and the things we’ve created.

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Join Liza and a host of other fantastic speakers at UX London 2018 — the 10th anniversary edition of Clearleft’s trailblazing UX conference. UX London takes place 23rd-25th May 2018 at Trinity Laban — tickets are on sale now at www.uxlondon.com