Themes
Every year, Design Matters digs deep into three topics that are relevant to the design industry and community. It’s around these themes that the talks and workshops revolve around. The themes are chosen by a committee of designers together with the Design Matters team a few months before the conference.
Scrappy Creative
Designers today need a messy set of skills, borrowed from psychology, business, coding, project management, storytelling, and more. It’s time to challenge our current design methods!
Over just the past couple of years, we’ve watched as a wave of digital products blend together the fake and the real. These products change our perception of identity, fact, and fiction, and have seeped into every corner of society — from the highest levels of politics, to the intimate relationships we hold over social media apps.
These products change our perception of identity, fact, and fiction, and have seeped into every corner of society — from the highest levels of politics, to the intimate relationships we hold over social media apps.
Real Fake
When we enhance our presence with face filters and avatars, find ourselves feeling more at ease in virtual worlds than in our daily lives, or use implants and wearables to directly connect technology to ourselves, we all take part in this soft transition into the semi-digital human. And when AI, robots, and cyborgs so evidently are entering our world, we increasingly learn to accept the artificial as a natural part of our civilization.
Designers today need a messy set of skills, borrowed from psychology, business, coding, project management, storytelling, and more. It’s time to challenge our current design methods! Designers today need a messy set of skills, borrowed from psychology, business, coding, project management, storytelling, and more. It’s time to challenge our current design methods!
Next Gen Design
Anyone born after 1996 has never lived in a world that wasn’t interconnected. We will zoom into the post-internet generation, to learn how digital natives think, communicate, and view the world.
The Design Matters 21 Committee is: Michael Christiansen, Ingrid Haug, Andrew Schmidt, David Bailey, Julie Søgaard, Michael König, Michelle Morrison, Yuhki Yamashita, Philip Linnemann, Rahul Lindberg Sen.