Why don’t design students coming out of school know about responsive design or creating mobile apps? Why are our self-taught hackers and Computer Science grads having a tough time keeping up with the pace of technology innovation?

It’s not that schools or professional development programs are slow to adapt; it’s more complicated than that. But our tendency to focus on skills alone just isn’t sustainable. Instead, we need to start investing in the ways we create designers and fuel their growth. Doing just that takes a combination of practical education, soft-skill development, and a commitment to lifelong learning. In this talk, Jared Spool will dig into all three so you can be a part of developing the next generation of designers.

This vital topic was the focus of a multi-year research program Jared conducted with Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman to identify how orgs educate, hire, train, and develop designers. Armed with huge amounts of data, the duo then designed and launched Center Centre, a bricks-and-mortar school that cultivates industry-ready UX designers.

So if you’ve ever wished there was a better system to support design thinkers like you, then this is your talk. After all, you could be part of defining the ideal solution.

This team wanted to do the right thing. They thought they were doing the right thing the right way. They tried to make planning for retirement simple and friendly. Visually, their app was inviting and warm. Navigating forward was simple and engaging. But the pleasures quickly faded as the flow was broken and the meaning was lost. Hear the story of this well-intentioned team and how they got close but not close enough to delighting their customers in their attempt to make saving for retirement fun.

Amazing design results start with a solid design practice. Over the last hundred or so years designers and design educators have established a foundation of skills, theory, and principles that give us a way of thinking about, talking about, and doing design. What are design foundations? How can we apply them? And where are they going in the 21st century?

The knowledge of craft and processes does little to help in the day-to-day relationship with teams and clients. That’s because the actual practical skills are just part of the game: there are competences that go beyond that: soft skills, sensibility, empathy, relational abilities, proactivity, etc. All of these are rarely highlighted or taught, and even less often they are used in specific tasks such as team growth or hiring.

The Hybrid Traits is an effective model to frame these additional skills, allowing us to focus on them and embed them in our professional life. It’s not easy however, because everything starts from the individual’s desire to practice introspection.

Discuss insights and techniques for building a nimble, effective and user-centred product team-a team that designs and builds great products for a global audience. We’ll take you behind the scenes at Optimal Workshop to discuss what a Minimal Viable Product really is, and-the hard part-what to do once you’ve got one.

Designers have the difficult job of bringing meaningful and valuable products/services to life within a complex environment of competing needs, constraints, and expectations. Those contextual factors, more than probably anything else, drive the success or failure of a design project, but they are often treated as irrelevant to the designer’s role.

How can we as designers and design leaders create the space where great design can flourish? As a way of exploring this question, we will zoom in on that moment at the beginning of a project when direction is established and the tone is set.

The time for technology-lead, business-focused innovation is past. The cultures of Six Sigma and process optimization will only give us incremental improvements, not break-through disruptions that will be needed to sustain our companies and our work. It’s time to disrupt our work practices and design ourselves anew. In this presentation, we will explore some of the specific ingredients in the broad landscape of innovation necessary for creative problem solving. We will go on a journey to play with our roles as facilitators and participants in collaborative innovation. We will use what we know from human-centered design, as well as new findings from neuroscience, to understand a new context for designing mind spaces for creativity by focusing on people rather than processes and practices.

Centuries of industrialisation have given shape to what an efficient organisation should look and work like. Today, we are living with that legacy, organisational silos divided by function or skill along with defined processes designed to maximise efficiency and scale. As an industry, we need to question what needs to evolve to enable people to work more collaboratively across different disciplines, divisions and organisations. To start defining and shaping the Future of Work, HeathWallace’s global panel will discuss how we can revisit our current approach to work and how we can break down barriers that are stopping us from creating more value.