O’Reilly Design Conference Learning Paths

Register now for the O’Reilly Design Conference, which will be held January 19-22, 2015, in San Francisco.

When reviewing the schedule for the O’Reilly Design Conference, you may wonder what shoe shopping with elders and the fisheries business have to do with design. Design’s impact is felt in every corner of our lives. And as a result, if you’re a designer you need to know more about more.

Remaining true to our roots, the O’Reilly Design Conference is all about learning new skills and bringing together different voices. We’ve planned several days of training for designers who want to increase their skill sets and widen their perspectives, including sessions on voice, industrial design, design thinking, prototyping, and running design reviews together with sessions like  creative coding, and discussions on data, ethics, and privacy. Our program emphasizes the full stack of skills designers need to work smarter.

The keynotes we’ve lined up for Thursday and Friday morning will provide new perspectives, and a sense of how design is impacting business and society. You’ll hear designers talk about their experiences in the VC world and what it’s like when the experiences you craft live in both the physical and the digital worlds. After lunch on Thursday and Friday, the program gets broad. Whether you come for the conference, workshops, or intensive training days — or all three — I’ve laid out a few themes that can help to shape the sessions you choose to attend.

Here are some possible learning paths:

• I want to learn how to design for the digital and physical world
• I want to learn how to manage, lead, and have a larger impact within my organization
• I want to learn how to learn how to work effectively in cross discipline teams.
• I want to learn how to be better at user research and using data to create better products
• I want to learn how to apply my design skills to societal issues

I want to learn how to design for digital and physical:

Wednesday, January 20

• Workshop: Practical lean UX for wearables
• Workshop: Sense and sensor ability
• Workshop: Fundamentals of voice interface design

Thursday, January 21

• Understanding industrial design: Principles for UX and interaction design
• Making zero UI: A design framework for invisible interfaces
• Direct manipulation is broken: Why IoT asks consumers to think like programmers, and the UX challenges this creates  
• Physical + digital: The emergence of smart spaces
• The house that knew too much
• Prototyping for physical and digital products

Friday, January 22

• From AI to IA: How AI and architecture created contemporary interaction
• Interaction considerations with virtual and augmented reality technology
• I hear voices: Explorations of multi-device experiences with conversational assistants

I want to learn how to manage, lead, and have a larger impact within my organization:

Tuesday, January 19

• Two-Day Training: 2-day MBA: Essential business skills for designers

Wednesday, January 20

• Two-Day Training:
  2-day MBA: Essential business skills for designers
• Workshop:Design sprints for product kickoff
• Workshop: Designing with data

Thursday, January 21

• The empathy gap
• Money by design
• Discuss design without losing your mind
• From design thinking to design driven
• The many minds of the maker: The programmer’s mental model and the coding designer

Friday, January 22

• Great products begin with great cultures
• The difficulties of driving design thinking in a large organization

I want to learn how to learn how to work effectively in cross discipline teams:

Tuesday, January 19

• Two-Day Training: (De)coding motion: Creative coding with processing
• Two-Day Training: 2-day MBA: Essential business skills for designers

Wednesday, January 20

• Two-Day Training: (De)coding motion: Creative coding with processing
• Two-Day Training: 2-day MBA: Essential business skills for designers
• Workshop: Design sprints for product kickoff
• Workshop: Designing with data

Thursday, January 21

• Prototyping for physical and digital products
• The many minds of the maker: The programmer’s mental model and the coding designer
• Extreme industrial disruption — design in highly regulated industries

Friday, January 22

• From Google Ventures: Design sprints for startups
• Great products begin with great cultures
• From AI to IA: How AI and architecture created contemporary interaction

I want to learn how improve my user research skills and use data to create products people love:

Wednesday, January 20

• Workshop: Designing with data
• Workshop: Design sprints for product kickoff

Thursday, January 21

• Measuring hard-to-measure things

• Co-designing a better shoe-shopping experience with elders
• Design’s responsibility: Time well spent
• Making sentiment surveys practical

Friday, January 22

• Understanding cities: Designing for scale

• Driving measurable impact: Designing with data for social impact
• From Google Ventures: Design sprints for startups
• UX for security: Perils of surveillance, pain of dashboards, and power of design
• Team-based personas — a new look at personas for the enterprise context

I want to learn how to apply my design skills to societal issues:

Wednesday, January 20

• Workshop: Designing with data

Thursday, January 21

• The empathy gap
• Design’s responsibility: Time well spent
• Hostile design

Friday, January 22

• Driving measurable impact: Designing with data for social impact
• Incubating sustainability: Fostering collaborative, data-driven design in developing world contexts
• The difficulties of driving design thinking in a large organization

In addition to the workshops, trainings, and sessions listed above, we’ve got a great panel for those of you thinking about starting your own company someday. Come listen to the Design and Venture Capital Panel and learn what VCs look for when making investment decisions.

We’ll also have a full program on voice design: we have several talks dedicated to this emerging space, including Abi Jones discussing speech recognition in How we talk and how machines listen, and Karen Kaushanky’s talk, I hear voices: Explorations of multi-device experiences with conversational assistants, as well as a half-day workshop on Voice UI from Tanya Kraljik.

See you at Fort Mason!