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  • DesignUp 🚀 Issue #76 > 2018 in Talks, Films, Books, Animated Shorts + #DUp18 rewind

DesignUp 🚀 Issue #76 > 2018 in Talks, Films, Books, Animated Shorts + #DUp18 rewind

For us, 2018 brought in a lot of wonderful memories 📸

We started off by hosting Alan Cooper in Bangalore, to meeting designers in Singapore, Hyderabad and Chennai—playing host to our most varied speaker line-up yet at #DUp18 🇿🇦🇮🇱🇦🇺🇱🇧🇺🇸🇮🇳🇸🇬🇲🇾🇮🇩and hosting attendees from around the world. We got inspired to start the Design Challenge with DesignIndaba 📻(and a reminder that the deadline is just a few weeks away, so hurry!)

This month, the new DesignUp website went live with a bunch of videos of the inspiring talks 📺 A smaller, more intimate, open-conversation format DesignUp Salon debuts in January 2019 ☕️And we are collaborating with UxNow in 2019 💥to bring a tiny slice of DesignUp to New Delhi 🔔save the dates: Feb 16-17 at The India Habitat Centre.

This issue was long overdue - and has 2018's round up of books, interfaces, design crimes, TED talks, some DesignUp reflections/rewind and even animated shorts. A pretty big list of interestingness.

Here's wishing you a wonderful 2019 😁

Some of the DesignUp 2018 talks are now online, including Daniel Burka's How To Be Wrong Faster, Jurgen Spangl's Love Story (on Scaling Design), and many more. Perfect inspiration to start the new year...

Tatiana Toutikian's mind expanding talk on Speculative Design Objects

"We’re not living in the future yet, but 2018 was an important year for demonstrating how all these technological puzzle pieces will fit together, eventually."

John Maeda lists his "100+ links in the history of Design-in-Tech going back to 2004 and stopping at 2014 … because design in the tech arena is so commonplace now." The rapid rise in number of links is an interesting one and beyond 2014 it's just too many.

"The biggest excuse I had for not going to the conference: I thought if the conferences were for learning purposes only, then I could just watch the recorded videos online - it would be the same thing." Nikhil Yadav, final year student at IIT Roorkee, shares his experience as an attendee, and DesignUp Scholar of 2018—and what finally convinced him that students should go to Design Conferences.

"Can we still trust the metrics? Even when we put our faith in their accuracy, there’s something not quite real about them..."

"We learned more and more about how tech companies are using design to deceive us, inciting us to share more data, buy more things, and spend more time with their products–but the failures of tech companies paled in comparison to the poor ballot and voting machine design of the midterm elections."

Save the dates: UxNow is back up North, in collaboration with DesignUp

Don Norman lists his book recommendations - it's not at all surprising to see Viktor Papanek's 1970s classic Design For The Real World on the list - for many of us it was essential reading at NID. So glad that newer generations are rediscovering a timeless book, and a visionary writer - even more relevant for the times we live in.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its shortlists for several Oscar categories last week, including best documentary, best foreign language film - and animated shorts. Watch 8 of the 10 films, available online now.

For those of you who missed DesignUp Conference in 2018, here's a round up from Leena Soni: No matter how many notes I could have taken, or the sessions I could have recorded, I don’t think there is any way that I can reflect and justify what I experienced at the DesignUp 2018. Here I’m listing 5 things that I learned at DesignUp 2018.

The most notable talks of 2018, chosen by TED Curator Chris Anderson. One of my favourites is by the prophet of positivity at scale: Steven Pinker. Pinker says we should look at things like climate change and nuclear war as problems to be solved, not apocalypses in waiting. "We will never have a perfect world," he says. "But there's no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing."

On that optimistic note, see you in 2019 👋