Tags: clear

Boom! The Clearleft podcast is back!

The first episode of season four just dropped. It’s all about design transformation.

I’ve got to be honest, this episode is a little inside baseball. It’s a bit navel-gazey and soul-searching as I pick apart the messaging emblazoned on the Clearleft website:

The design transformation consultancy.

Whereas most of the previous episodes of the podcast would be of interest to our peers—fellow designers—this one feels like it might of more interest to potential clients. But I hope it’s not too sales-y.

You’ll hear from Danish designer Maja Raunbak, and American in Amsterdam Nick Thiel as well as Clearleft’s own Chris Pearce. And I’ve sampled a talk from the Leading Design archives by Stuart Frisby.

The episode clocks in at a brisk eighteen and a half minutes. Have a listen.

While you’re at it, take this opportunity to subscribe to the Clearleft podcast on Overcast, Spotify, Apple, Google or by using a good ol’-fashioned RSS feed. That way the next episodes in the season will magically appear in your podcatching software of choice.

But I’m not making any promises about when that will be. Previously, I released new episodes in a season on a weekly basis. This time I’m going to release each episode whenever it’s ready. That might mean there’ll be a week or two between episodes. Or there might be a month or so between episodes.

I realise that this unpredictable release cycle is the exact opposite of what you’re supposed to do, but it’s actually the most sensible way for me to make sure the podcast actually gets out. I was getting a bit overwhelmed with the prospect of having six episodes ready to launch over a six week period. What with curating UX London and other activities, it would’ve been too much for me to do.

So rather than delay this season any longer, I’m going to drop each episode whenever it’s done. Chaos! Anarchy! Dogs and cats living together!

I’d like to play it cool when I announce the latest speakers for UX London 2023, like I could be all nonchalant and say, “oh yeah, did I not mention these people are also speaking…?”

But I wouldn’t be able to keep up that façade for longer than a second. The truth is I am excited to the point of skittish gigglyness about this line-up.

Look, I’ll let you explore these speakers for yourself while I try to remain calm and simply enumerate the latest additions…

• Ignacia Orellana, Service design and research consultant,
• Stefanie Posavec, Designer, artist and author, and
• David Dylan Thomas, Author, speaker, filmmaker.

The line-up is almost complete now! Just one more speaker to announce.

I highly recommend you get your UX London ticket if you haven’t already. You won’t want to miss this!

I know I’m being tease, doling out these UX London speaker announcements in batches rather than one big reveal. Indulge me in my suspense-ratcheting behaviour.

Today I’d like to unveil three speakers whose surnames start with the letter H…

• Stephen Hay, Creative Director at Rabobank,
• Asia Hoe, Senior Product Designer, and
• Amy Hupe, Design Systems consultant at Frankly Design.

Just look at how that line-up is coming together! There’ll be just one more announcement and then the roster will be complete.

But don’t wait for that. Grab your ticket now and I’ll see you in London on June 22nd and 23rd!

I am positively giddy with excitement to tell you about some more speakers you can look forward to at UX London 2023:

• Stacey Mendez, Product and Experience Designer,
• Hannah Smith, Director of Operations at the Green Web Foundation,
• Vitaly Friedman, Creative Lead at Smashing Magazine, and
• Trine Falbe, Ethical Design Consultant at Falbe Consulting.

I have more confirmed speakers but I’m going to be a tease and save them for a separate announcement soon. You can expect more of the same: smart, fabulous people with all kinds of design experience that they’re going to share with you at UX London.

But why wait for another speaker announcement? Get your ticket to UX London 2023 now!

If you’re a western white guy like me, you’re playing life on its easiest setting. If you’re also a designer, then you should get a ticket to UX London. You can probably get work to pay for it. Share this list of reasons to attend with your boss if you have to.

If, on the other hand, you don’t benefit from the same level of privilege as me, you might still be able to attend UX London 2023. We’re running a scholarship programme.

“We” in this case is Clearleft. But as we also need to at least break even on this event, there are only a limited number of scholarship spots available.

Now, if your company were in a position to pony up some moolah to sponsor more diversity scholarship places, we would dearly love to hear from you—get in touch!

If you think you might qualify for a diversity scholarship, fill in this form before May 19th. We’ll then notify you by May 26th, whether you application is successful or not. And if you’re worried about the additional costs of travel and accommodation, I’m sure we can figure something out.

Wondering if you should apply? It’s hard to define exactly who qualifies for a diversity scholarship, but basically, the more your life experience matches mine, the less qualified you are. If you are a fellow able-bodied middle-aged heterosexual white dude with a comfortable income, do me a favour and don’t apply. Everyone else, go for it.

I’ve been redesigning UX London. I don’t mean the website. I mean the event itself.

Don’t worry, it’s nothing too radical. It’s not like we’re changing the focus of the event, which remains a nerdfest for all things design-related.

But there are plenty of other opportunities for tweaking a conference like this: the format, the timings, the location.

For 2023 we’re not changing the location. Tobacco Dock worked out well for last year’s event, although it is very expensive (then again, so is anywhere decent in London). Last year there were a lot of unknowns in play because it was our first time using the venue. It feels good that this year we don’t have to go through quite as much uncertainty.

The most obvious change to UX London this year is the length. The event will last for two days instead of three.

Running a three-day event was a lot of work, so this helps relieve the pressure. It was also asking a lot of attendees. That’s why we also offered one-day tickets. For the people who couldn’t commit to three days at a conference, there was the option to pick and choose.

But that brought its own issues. Instead of everyone having the same shared experience, the audience was a bit fractured.

Now that we’ve slimmed it down to two days, we’re selling the same two-day tickets for everyone. No more single-day tickets; no more partial attendance. Judging by the way ticket sales have been going, this is a very welcome move.

(Even before announcing any speakers, we had already sold a healthy amount of tickets. That’s probably testament to the great reputation that UX London has built up over the years. I need to make sure I don’t squander that good will. No pressure.)

On the subject of everyone having a shared experience, there’s something about the format of UX London that’s bothered me for a while…

Each day is split into two halves. In the morning, you’ve got inspirational talks. That’s one single track. Then in the afternoon, you’ve got hands-on practical workshops. They happen in parallel.

That makes for a great mix, but the one downside is that the day ends with the audience split across the different workshops.

This year I’m tweaking the format slightly. We’ll still have a single track of talks in the morning followed by multiple workshops in the afternoon, but I’m shortening the workshop length slightly to fit in one last talk at the end of the day. That way, everybody will come back together again after their workshops to participate in a shared experience.

The audience will converge at the beginning of the day, diverge in the afternoon, and this time we’ll converge again at day’s end.

The workshops are a big part of what makes UX London stand out. But they also pose a big design challenge. How do you ensure that everyone gets to attend the workshops they want?

We could make people pick their workshops in advance. But then you end up with the office Christmas dinner party problem—you know the one; everyone has to choose their meal way in advance, and then on the day, no one remembers what they ordered.

Besides, if we make people choose in advance, it’s not fair on people who buy their ticket close to the event.

In the end, using a first-come, first-served strategy on the day has worked out best. But it’s not ideal. You could miss out on attending your first choice of workshop if you’re not fast enough.

This year we’re trying something new. Each afternoon there’ll be a choice of workshops, as always. But this time, it’ll be the same workshops on both days. That way, every attendee gets a second chance to get to the workshops they want. And it’ll help reduce the FOMO—Fear Of Missing Out. It still won’t be possible to attend all the workshops without cloning yourself, but this way, you get to attend half of them.

To recap, here’s the redesigned format for UX London 2023:

• It’s a two-day event on June 22nd and 23rd—there are no individual day tickets.
• There are talks in the morning, workshops in the afternoon, and one final talk at the end of the day.
• The workshops will be repeated each day so nobody misses out on the workshop they want.

The line-up is coming together nicely. I’ve got more confirmed speakers, who I don’t want to reveal just yet. But trust me, you won’t want to miss this!

Oh, and you should probably grab your ticket this week if you haven’t already: early-bird pricing ends on midnight on Friday, February 24th.

Please put your fingers on the desk in front of you and move them up and down rapidly in the manner of a snare drum…

I’m very happy to announce the first four speakers for UX London 2023:

• Imran Afzal, Principal Designer at Co-op Digital,
• Vimla Appadoo, Head of Experience at Culture Shift,
• Daniel Burka, Director of Design at Resolve to Save Lives, and
• Mansi Gupta, Founder of Unconform.

This is shaping up nicely! You can expect some more speaker announcements before too long.

But don’t wait too long to get your ticket—early-bird pricing ends this month on Friday, February 24th. Then the price goes up by £200. If you need to convince your boss, here are some reasons to attend.

I very much look forward to seeing you at Tobacco Dock on June 22nd and 23rd this year!

My upcoming appearance at An Event Apart next week to talk about declarative design isn’t the only upcoming trip to San Francisco in my calendar.

Two months from today I’ll be back in San Francisco for Leading Design. It’s on February 7th and 8th.

This event is long overdue. We’ve never had Leading Design in San Francisco before, but we were all set to go ahead with the inaugural SF gathering …in March 2020. We all know what happened next.

So this event will be three years in the making.

Rebacca is doing amazing work, as usual, putting together a fantastic line-up of speakers:

They’ll be sharing their insights, their stories and their ideas — as well as some of their pain from past challenges. It’s all designed to help you navigate your own leadership journey.

I’ll be there to MC the event, which is a great honour for me. And I reckon I’ll be up to the challenge, having just done the double whammy of hosting Leading Design London and Clarity back-to-back.

I would love to see you in San Francisco! If you’ve attended a Leading Design event before, then you know how transformational it can be. If you haven’t, then now is your chance.

Early bird tickets are still available until mid December, so if you’re thinking about coming, I suggest making that decision now.

If you know anyone in the bay area who’s in a design leadership position, be sure to tell them about Leading Design San Francisco—they don’t want to miss this!

I am very excited to announce that UX London will be back in 2023!

We’re returning to Tobacco Dock. Save the dates: June 22nd and 23rd.

Wait …that’s only two days. Previously UX London was a three-day event and you could either go for all three days or get a ticket for just one day.

Well, that’s changing. UX London 2023 will be condensed into a two-day event. You get a ticket for both days and everyone shares the experience.

I’m very excited about this! I’m planning to make some other tweaks to the format, but the basic structure of each day remains roughly the same: inspirational talks in the morning followed by hands-on workshops in the afternoon.

As for the who’ll be giving those talks and running those workshops …well, that’s what I’m currently putting together. For the second year in row, I’m curating the line-up. It’s exciting—like a planning a heist, assembling a team of supersmart people with specialised skillsets.

I can’t wait to reveal more. For now though, you can trust me when I say that the line-up is going to be stellar.

If you do trust me, you can get your super early-bird ticket, you’ve got until this Friday, December 2nd.

The super early-bird tickets are an absolute steal at £695 plus VAT. After Friday, you’ll be able to get early-bird tickets for the more reasonable price of £995 plus VAT.

Keep an eye on the UX London website for speaker announcements. I’ll also be revealing those updates here too because, as you can probably tell, I’m positively gleeful about UX London 2023.

See you there!

dConstruct 2022 was great fun. It was also the last ever dConstruct.

If you were there, and you’d like to re-live the magic, the audio from the talks is now available on the dConstruct Archive. Here they are:

• George Oates
• Lauren Beukes
• Daniel Burka
• Sarah Angliss
• Matt Webb
• Seb Lee-Delisle
• Anil Seth

Thanks to some service worker magic, you can select any of those talks for offline listening later.

The audio is also available on Huffduffer on the dConstruct Huffduffer account. Here’s the RSS feed that you can pop into your podcast software of choice.

If you’re more of a visual person, you can watch videos of the slides synced with the audio. They’ve all got captions too (good ones, not just automatically generated).

So have a listen in whichever way you prefer.

Now that I’ve added the audio from the last dConstruct to the dConstruct archive, it feels like the closing scene of Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Roll credits.

dConstruct 2022 happened last Friday, September 9th.

And what an event it was! All eight talks were superb. To have eight speakers and not a single dud is pretty great. To have eight speakers and each one be absolutely brilliant is more than I could’ve hoped for.

Hidde has written a summary of the talks. I loved each and every one. I got to sit there in the front row of the beautiful Duke of York’s cinema and watch these supersmart people blow my mind.

With six of the eight speakers having spoken at previous dConstructs, there was a lot of nostalgia in the air on Friday.

It was the last dConstruct.

A lot of people seemed surprised by this even though I kept saying it was a one-off event. Really, the last dConstruct happened in 2015. This year’s event was a one-time-only anniversary event.

Obviously because the day was so great, people expressed sadness and disappointment that there wouldn’t be another. But like I said, if a band like The Velvet Underground reforms to do one last gig, that’s pretty cool; but if a band like The Velvet Underground reforms to go on endless tours, that’s kind of sad. It’s time to move on. Have one last blow-out and go out in style.

And who knows? Maybe there’ll be some other kind of dConstructy gathering in a different format. Perhaps an evening salon event is more suited to this kind of interdisciplinary mish-mash. But as a one-day conference, dConstruct is now officially over.

To be honest, there was never any doubt that dConstruct 2022 would be an excellent day of talks. I knew that each of the speakers would deliver the goods. I played it somewhat safe with the line-up. Because this was a kind of “best of” event, I could draw upon speakers from previous years who were guaranteed to be mesmerising.

In a weird way, that also highlights the biggest problem with this year’s dConstruct. Even though every individual talk was terrific, when you pull back and look at the line-up in aggregate, you can’t help but notice its lack of diversity.

That’s on me.

I could show you the list of people I tried to get. I could talk you through the spots that fell through. But all I’d be doing is giving you excuses. I could show that my intentions were good, but intentions don’t matter as much as actions. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and what we ate last Friday was wonderful but also sadly representative of dConstruct’s homogenous history. For that reason alone, it’s time to draw a line under dConstruct.

It was a bittersweet send-off. On the one hand, I got to enjoy a day of brilliant talks. On the other hand, I’m pretty disappointed in myself that the line-up wasn’t more diverse. I can make all the claims I want about valuing diversity, but they’re hollow without meaningful results.

So that’s enough looking to the past. I’m bidding farewell to dConstruct and setting my sights on the future, a future that features more and different voices.

If you came along to dConstruct 2022, thank you! If you enjoyed attending dConstruct just half as much as I enjoyed hosting it …well, then I enjoyed it twice as much as you.