- DesignUp Newsletter
- Posts
- DesignUp 🚀 Issue #80: DUp19 Updates, Maps, Presenting Design, Leading, Data Design
DesignUp 🚀 Issue #80: DUp19 Updates, Maps, Presenting Design, Leading, Data Design
The 80th issue is late and long.
There's a bunch of DesignUp 2019 Festival updates (that I have been late in sharing), plus some interestingness: stuff I chanced upon - from managing growing teams, presenting design to technochauvinism & maps, and acing a TED talk.
I have also added a new section - my book recommendation. Well, I do still manage to pack in a few books every few months (wish it was weeks).
The DesignUp Updates...
It's here: the full 5-day schedule for the #DUp19 Festival, Bangalore. From Walks to Talks, Masterclasses, Workshops, Panels, Dinners with Speakers, Studio-Tours, Installations, Networking, Pub-hopping + more! Time to plan your trip...
“With an incredibly diverse population of more than 1.3 billion people, it’s safe to say India has its own unique opportunities in the world of digital products. In many ways, it is the new frontier of UX design — with a hungry, driven group of new UX designers..." And yet, to understand Design maturity in organisations, understanding valued skills, to hiring landscape and emerging trends, our first (and often only) port of call is usually studies and reports from America’s East and West coasts.
Participate in DesignUp Deconstruct - lend your voice, have your say, add your own story. You could participate anonymously or reveal your identity and win give-aways!
This year we offer you a new way to observe, immerse and interact with design studios in Bangalore - DesignUp Studio Tours. If you are a visiting designer who wants to know the user insights that drive business in specific industries or want to know the inside stories of how design teams function, leadership to rookie, you should get on this bus.
This year we have an expanded Masterclass list - and more varied. From Jon Kolko's Inselling Innovation to Ushaidi's Eriol Fox on Open Source Tech for Impact, Giles' Advanced Simplicity to Voice Interfaces and much more. Take a peek...
And there's more...
"Technochauvinism has been used to create an unnecessary, occasionally harmful bias for digital over print or any other kind of interface. A glance at the research reveals that the paper map still thrives in the digital era, and there are distinct advantages to using print maps."
Professionals - wether they're Doctors or Designers, often get mired in their specialism, expect others to know, to understand. Over the years I have watched and intervened - in many a design presentation, and this one is a good set of do's/don'ts.
Speaking at DesignUp? Or another big ticket conference? Then this one is for you... "According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy."
"As soon as I figured out a better process, a few more people would join and the gears would get clogged once more. The only way to stay effective was to constantly change and adapt. [...] Looking back, these are the five most striking contrasts between managing small and large teams..."
Manuel Lima who founded and heads Google’s data visualization team (formed in 2018)— has published Google’s Six Principles for Designing Any Chart, a cheat sheet to clear, accessible data visualizations. The principles weigh in on topics ranging from typography to the practice of dishonestly presenting data to serve an agenda.
Recent Reads...
Despite all the DesignUp madness, and no thanks to all the extended medical emergencies in personal life - I found myself hooked to Being Mortal: Medicine and what matters in the end. NYT says it is "is a valuable contribution to the growing literature on aging, death and dying. It contains unsparing descriptions of bodily aging and the way it often takes us by surprise." Paradoxically, though it is about death and dying - hidden in plain sight is a reaffirmation of what it means to be human, what it means to celebrate life - even in our finite and measured lifetimes. You possibly need to be in a certain frame of mind to read this work. I'll leave you with this from Dr Gawande:
"In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all of its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people’s minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life may be empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves."
Until the next (erratic) issue...