In order to share some of the excellent presenters coming to Sydney for
UXAustralia, Six Sydney Meetups are teaming up to bring a little taste
of some of the stellar people speaking at the conference to some of you
who might not be able to make it. Two nights before UXAu kicks off,
we'll be hosting up to 6 of the presenters to give a lightning talk,
then break off into groups so people can Q&A and discuss more
specifically with each of them.

We've not done this before so fingers crossed it will all work out!

AGENDA

5:30 - 6:10 PM Check-in, nibbles, chatting
6:15 - 725 PM Quick intro, then Lightning talks
7:30 - 8:00 PM Break out sessions
8:00 - 8:30 PM Recap and wind up
8:30 PM Exeunt! Out to the pub (The CideryBar)

Participating Sydney meetup groups include:

Presenters

A number of presenters from UXAustralia have agreed to give a lightning talk, then we will separate out into groups around each speaker to dive into each topic in more detail.

Aral Balkan (@aral)

Aral is a cyborg rights activist, designer, and developer. He's one-third of Indie, a tiny not-for-profit working for social justice in the digital age.

Aral is a designer and programmer who has been making things with computers for the past 35 years. He’s spent the last five of those working on the problem of technologically regulating the abuses of surveillance capitalism as well as designing freedom-respecting alternatives to it. In this talk, he presents his latest thinking on how we can create alternatives to surveillance capitalism that cannot be co-opted. His suggestion is simple: think small.

Liz Jackson (@elizejackson)

Liz Jackson is the founder of The Disabled List, a design organization
that engages in disability as a creative practice. She is also the
co-founder of Thisten, a live speech to text app that makes conferences
and live events more accessible. In 2018, Jackson created The WITH
Fellowship, which partners disabled creatives with top design studios
and creative spaces for three-month fellowships. You can learn more
about Liz in her personal website, The Girl with the Purple Cane.

Joe MacLeod (@mrmacleod)

Joe Macleod has decades of product development experience across
digital, physical and service sectors. Previously Head of Design at the
award-winning studio Ustwo. He then spent 3 years on the Closure
Experiences project researching, writing and publishing the Ends book.
He is now founder of andEnd - The world’s first business helping
companies end their customer relationships.

Chris Noessel (@chrisnoessel)

Christopher is the Senior Lead Designer for the Embedded Agent AI within Watson Customer Engagement with IBM. He teaches, speaks about, and evangelizes design internationally. His spidey-sense goes off semi-randomly, leading him to investigate and speak about a range of things from interactive narrative to ethnographic user research, interaction design to generative randomness, and designing for the future. He is co-author of Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction (Rosenfeld Media, 2012), co-author of About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, 4th Edition (Wiley, 2015), keeper of the blog scifiinterfaces.com, and author of Designing Agentive Technology: AI That Works for People (Rosenfeld Media, 2017). He is also on the advisory board of the ASU-OTI AI Policy Futures initiative. He is currently contemplating books about meaning machines and interfaces that improve their users.

Grace Turtle Polifroni (@grace_polifroni)

Grace L Turtle Polifroni is a post-disciplinary designer, exploring
critical becomings, futures and transitions produced through
experimentation, collaborative storytelling and performative action.
Grace currently plays in a few worlds; as the Experimental Futures
practice lead within Deloitte Digital Customer Strategy and Design,
working across foresight strategy, service and experience design. Grace
also works with Becoming and Holon, both transitions oriented research
and design studios based out of Barcelona, developing experimental and
performative design research - creating the conditions to imagine worlds
otherwise, a focus she has transferred to teaching Futuring within
Design Studies at the University of Technology Sydney UTS.

Venue Sponsor

Arq Group, previously Melbourne IT Group, is Australia’s leading digital solutions partner. Arq Group is the dynamic space for smart thinkers. Creating unforgettable experiences, solving complex challenges and providing seamless, end-to-end solutions – from design thinking to customer solutions, leading mobile, cloud and analytical insights, digital marketing to web design – Arq Group powers the growth of businesses, big and small.

Main photo by Perry Grone on Unsplash