GEDS founder and SXSW advisor Gulay Ozkan shares her design session recommendations for this year’s festival.
As part of SXSW 2020’s Design, Fantastic Future and Place by Design advisory boards, I wanted to share my recommendations for the top design sessions to watch out for at this year’s festival.
My criteria for this list was simple: Diverse topics that cover current trends and presented by speakers with impressive backgrounds. But with 23 tracks and another 17 during design sessions, it’s almost an impossible mission. Not to mention the huge selection of side events, concerts, film premieres, and parties.
In my opinion, one of the greatest pain-points of SXSW is selecting the sessions and using your time effectively. So, if you don’t have time to check all the design sessions and have limited availability to attend the sessions, here is my round-up of the top sessions to help you catch up with current design discussions.
2019 Featured Session, Tinker Hatfield with Scott Dadich – Photo by Christopher Bouie
MONDAY MARCH 16, 2020
Inclusive Design: A New Frontier in the Age of AI, MAR 16, 2020 | 9:30AM – 10:30AM | JW Marriott 110 E 2nd St. Salon E
This session covers the current state of intentional/unintentional exclusion in product development, and how to create products with inclusive design methodologies. The session is moderated by designer Fanny Krivoy with speakers Nicola Palmarini, Director of the UK’s National Innovation Centre For Aging, Dorrie Rush, and Chief Content Officer at OEPatients.org, Frances West.
Mind Journeys: Designing for Cognitive UX, MAR 16, 2020 | 11:00AM – 12:00PM | JW Marriott 110 E 2nd St. Salon D
This is one of the sessions I am most looking forward to attending. Mind journeys are one of the hot design topics of SXSW this year. This session will be presented by Emily Wengert, EVP and Jason Schlossberg, Managing Director of Huge. They will explore how principles of behavioral economics can be combined to recognize, and even nudge, a user’s mind journey through Cognitive UX.
Place by Design, MAR 16, 2020 | 3:30PM – 4:30PM | JW Marriott 110 E 2nd St. Salon E
If you want to go out of your daily design practice and meet designers and architects who created impact through their creative solutions in different environments, then you can’t miss this session. You can meet the 5 finalists of the Place by Design awards and listen to their pitches to the judges. It is a great chance to expand your horizon.
TUESDAY MARCH 17, 2020
Playbook for Accessible & Inclusive Design Systems, MAR 17, 2020 | 9:30AM – 10:30AM | JW Marriott 110 E 2nd St. Salon D
You must attend at least one design system talk this year. There were a lot of design system talk proposals submitted this year, but when I reviewed this proposal for the first time, I thought that this would be a fantastic opportunity to cover the topic from many different dimensions and anyone (no background on design systems required!) can leave the session with a certain level of knowledge that they can later build on. As far as I can see, this is the only design system session at SXSW 2020. Don’t miss this session if you’re interested in learning how to scale design, especially in large organizations. James Green of Visa and Caleb Watson of Visa Inc. will share a playbook for design systems.
Designing for a World Beyond Screens, MAR 17, 2020 | 12:30PM – 1:30PM | JW Marriott 110 E 2nd St. Salon D
This session will cover how to create a consistent experience on any platform, from an iPhone to a television, or an Alexa to a Microsoft Hololens. The talk is presented by Mark Webster, Director of product for Adobe, with a focus on voice integration for Adobe XD.
WEDNESDAY MARCH 18, 2020
The Google Conversation Design Workshop, MAR 18, 2020 | 11:00AM – 3:00PM | Austin Convention Center 500 E Cesar Chavez, Room 8ABC
This Session was originally part of the design track. It is now part of the Professional Development track, but I still want to include it in my list, as it is a great chance to experience a hands-on design workshop run by a great team. The workshop will teach the process of designing a conversation of a conversational and natural language interface to interact with digital services. It will run by Wally Brill, Head of Conversation Design Advocacy & Education, Hannah McBride, Conversation Designer and Cathy Pearl, Head of Conversation Design Outreach from Google. The only problem with this workshop is finding a spot. You must RSVP even before SXSW starts. Good luck!
THURSDAY MARCH 19, 2020
Designing AI Products and Services, MAR 19, 2020 | 12:30PM – 1:30PM | JW Marriott 110 E 2nd St. Salon D
Qian Yang and Prof John Zimmerman of Carnegie Mellon University will train UX designers to recognize opportunities to engage AI as a design material. It will discuss AI’s capabilities, design patterns, and new design methods. This session will be very interesting. I’m very much looking forward to attending this session.
2020 CX Report, Mar 19, 2020 | 3:30pm – 4:30pm | JW Marriott 110 E 2nd St. Salon 5-6
In this session, John Maeda is relaunching Design Report as the CX Report. This is for sure going to be one of the most in-demand design sessions of SXSW. John Maeda recently joined Publicis Sapient and published his book ‘How To Speak Machine: Computational Thinking For The Rest Of Us’.
FRIDAY MARCH 20, 2020
Old People are Cool, Design for Them Sucks, Mar 20, 2020 | 11:00am – 12:00pm | JW Marriott 110 E 2nd St. Salon E
This is one of the sessions that I was honored to evaluate. Acclaimed designer Ayse Birsel and researcher, professor, and author Don Norman and John Zapolski, head of innovations at the SCAN Foundation will be discussing how to design for people over 65.
Using Science Fiction to Inspire Innovation, MAR 20, 2020 | 12:30PM – 1:30PM | JW Marriott 110 E 2nd St. Salon D
Christine Miller Kelly and Jody Medich were both parts of Singularity University’s design team and have since founded Superhuman-x. This is one of their first public talks as the founders. Christine and Jody will talk about how to use sci-fi storytelling for disruptive innovation alongside a group of collaborators. I attended their workshop in San Francisco in 2016. It was a nice experience. I hope they will run this session in the workshop format again.
Will you be attending SXSW 2020? If you are interested in meeting with Gulay Ozkan, you can reach out to us from here. Please follow @gulayozkan and @GEDStweet on Twitter for daily tips and updates from SXSW.
