Speaking at Defuse Dublin 2014

Detail from what might just be my favourite slide. 

I am delighted to have been invited to speak at this year’s Defuse Dublin event in November. The line up of speakers looks interesting and this should be an enjoyable and educational evening. 

The topic of my presentation is ‘A Future For Designers’. (Well why not aim high?) I reasoned that it would be somewhat ambitious to try and figure out *The* Future For Designers — never mind then trying to present that within five minutes. But thinking about one possible future seems a worthwhile intellectual exercise.

I submitted this original outline for my talk back in August:

“We all know that we need to innovate. But which of the different classes of innovation should we expend our best efforts on? That choice effects the kind of futures we shall build. What novel roles could designers play within those futures? If it is not going to be what we expect or desire, what can we designers do to future-proof our careers?”

The final version of my talk is not as expansive as all that, given the realities of tailoring my message to fit twenty slides delivered in five minutes. 

This talk can be considered as a third instalment of an ongoing exploration I began in Applying Design Thinking to Big Data, Uber-fication, The End of Average and The Capitalist’s Dilemma and continued in The Future Of Work And The Internet Rainforest.

(And if I had more than five minutes, my talk could have included more slides on Christensen’s Disruption Theory as well as some Pixar Easter Eggs, cartoon hipsters from the Simpsons, Morpheus’ Red Pill/Blue Pill from The Matrix, and hard-take-off AIs. Who knows, maybe next time?)

Hopefully see you at The Sugar Club on the thirteenth.