DUp 176 🎶 People Before Pixels, Speakers & Masterclass Hosts, AltCwithJD, GuestEd > Music, Sound Design, Delicious in Dungeons and more

It’s just 41 days to go for the 2024 DesignUp Conference. But there’s more in this Newsletter, specially curated by Atlassian’s India Design Head Vandana Abraham + the full episode of AltCwithJD featuring a rockstar, a real one!

Quick recap on the #DUp24Conf we’re all excited about, and we hope to see you in person too -
☀️ New speakers announced
☀️ Workshops and Masterclasses all linedUp (announcing soon)
☀️ Conf Passes (Just-In-Time) and Premium+Hotel passes sold out
☀️ The Independence Day special deal sold out “at the stroke of midnight hour” - of the 16th though :)

But people before pixels as we say, so first, introducing 2 Speakers and Masterclass Hosts…

We’re thrilled to present Josh Clark, UX leader and founder of NY-based studio Big Medium, as one of the speakers at DUp2024. Author of several books, including Designing for Touch and Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps, Josh is also the mastermind behind Couch to 5K, a proven method to get off that snug couch and be on your way to the first 5K! And he’s helped millions clock in over millions of KMs!

Joining him is designer and researcher at Big Medium, Veronika Kindred. Veronika’s research projects have included building clean data sets from congressional hearings on climate change, studying the effects of mobile technology on African political engagement, and exploring how AI has impacted user experience.

🎶 Audio Special with Vandana Abraham

Vandana Abraham, Head of Design at Atlassian, is one of the OG in Design, having spent multiple decades in the profession. DesignUp attendees are familiar with her talk Designing Design Orgs from DUp 2016. Vandana’s career spans over twenty-five years in the UX industry, in both consumer and enterprise software.

Today Vandana has curated a special set of audio content for our newsletter readers.

“This podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz is a delight - the beautiful science and art of audio. Here’s a fav episode:

I’m working on being more present in real life. Less of living in my head, and less virtual/digital living - listening to lots and lots of music, and finally studying the piano. I practiced an hour a day over the past year.

Music is a language of communication and it’s evolved so much over decades as technology has changed. What composers want to say hasn’t changed much - the structure of expression and the instruments evolve. This series lays out the key periods in history—the inflection points in music—and the podcast hosts also reference long excerpts of music. A great resource for the sounds in different centuries.

I’ve also been enjoying Chopin’s Nocturnes. This playlist has the best ones played by Arthur Rubinstein.

Apart from the piano, I’m also learning French - since I’m visiting France in September and thought I’d be able to pick up some basic phrases to communicate in 2 months. Duolingo of course is excellent as a primer to build vocabulary, and I also found the Coffee Break French podcast was great to speak along with while doing the morning commute.

I’m watching Delicious in Dungeon, a Japanese manga series. It has great world-building inside a dungeon with many levels, a motley team of adventurers on a mission to rescue one of their family who work together to battle monsters - and a recipe to make delicious meals with the monster of the week! It’s funny and creative, dark and dire, fantasy anime.

“WTF is” with Nikhil Kamath is another podcast series I’ve been listening to. What I liked about this series is that we’re listening to expert practitioners in an industry share their success stories and insights on what that industry needs today - whether this be gaming in India, the giant alcohol business, or e-mobility. In all of them, there is a deep understanding of customer behaviors, the technology of their domain, market vectors, and an entrepreneurial spirit. Though each episode comes in at a hefty 2+ hours, it’s definitely worth listening to if you’re looking to invest or explore an opportunity in any of these areas.

And finally, MyMuse - a new entrant into the market, beautifully designed toys for adults. It’s great to see thoughtful designs for women, designed to make intimacy easy, approachable, and fun.

🚀 New Episode Drop

The latest episode of AltC features Singer, Songwriter, and Musician Raghu Dixit in an open conversation with Jay - on finding a foothold in the world of Music for a rank-outsider: the struggles, patience, perseverance, training, relearning, and much more. From being rejected summarily by record labels, to being invited to perform at the Paris 2024 Olympics, his is quite the journey! Watch/hear or save for watch-later!

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🍀 Stay calm and stay curious,

@soosixty & @jdallcaps