"O’Reilly Design Conference" entries

Design Startup Showcase: Call for proposals

Get your new design product or prototype in front of industry movers and shakers at the O’Reilly Design Conference.

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The O’Reilly Design Conference is just a few short months away, and we’re thrilled to announce that we’ll be hosting a Startup Showcase.

We’re seeking design startups that want to pitch judges and attendees — a broad selection of venture capitalists, leaders, and innovators from the investment and design communities. Successful applicants will receive free space in the exhibit hall at the Design Conference. Onsite, a panel of judges will vote for the best in show — winners will be announced on the keynote stage and will be featured in a post on oreilly.com.

Startup requirements include:

  • Must be early stage, under three years.
  • Your product should not yet be launched but within view of shipping an early version, or you may bring a fairly polished prototype (you can’t show up with a laptop displaying a 3D rendering).
  • Your startup must be pre-Series A.
  • Your product must be scalable, repeatable — i.e., not a consultancy.
  • Read more…

O’Reilly Design Conference Learning Paths

Our program will emphasize the full stack of skills designers need to work smarter.

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Register now for the O’Reilly Design Conference, which will be held January 19-22, 2015, in San Francisco.

When reviewing the schedule for the O’Reilly Design Conference, you may wonder what shoe shopping with elders and the fisheries business have to do with design. Design’s impact is felt in every corner of our lives. And as a result, if you’re a designer you need to know more about more.

Remaining true to our roots, the O’Reilly Design Conference is all about learning new skills and bringing together different voices. We’ve planned several days of training for designers who want to increase their skill sets and widen their perspectives, including sessions on voice, industrial design, design thinking, prototyping, and running design reviews together with sessions like  creative coding, and discussions on data, ethics, and privacy. Our program emphasizes the full stack of skills designers need to work smarter.

The keynotes we’ve lined up for Thursday and Friday morning will provide new perspectives, and a sense of how design is impacting business and society. You’ll hear designers talk about their experiences in the VC world and what it’s like when the experiences you craft live in both the physical and the digital worlds. After lunch on Thursday and Friday, the program gets broad. Whether you come for the conference, workshops, or intensive training days — or all three — I’ve laid out a few themes that can help to shape the sessions you choose to attend.

Here are some possible learning paths:

  • I want to learn how to design for the digital and physical world
  • I want to learn how to manage, lead, and have a larger impact within my organization
  • I want to learn how to learn how to work effectively in cross discipline teams.
  • I want to learn how to be better at user research and using data to create better products
  • I want to learn how to apply my design skills to societal issues

Read more…

Every (successful) company is a service company

Designers are helping to shape the businesses, products, and services in our changing economy.

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Register now for the O’Reilly Design Conference, which will explore the evolving role of design in business and society along with the tools designers need to shape the next generation of products and services.

Loosely defined, service is the relationship between consumer and company. There are traditional service companies, such as hotels and transportation companies, and their modern counterparts Uber and Airbnb.

Then there are companies that are changing their identities from product companies to service companies, with varying degrees of success: for example, IBM, morphing from hardware to services, and Adobe, moving its software model to a cloud-based, subscription-based service. Whether you’re new to the game or established, almost any product today must have a service aspect.

Why does this matter — and what does it mean for designers?

Tim O’Reilly wrote a recent piece on how the economy is being shaped by software and connectedness. He explained:

One way to think about the new generation of on-demand companies, such as Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb, is that they are networked platforms for physical world services, which are bringing fragmented industries into the 21st century in the same way that ecommerce has transformed retail.

The evidence is clear: we’re living in an attention economy, with thousands of devices and companies competing for eyeballs. Our products are now connected and smart, and the consumer-product relationship is long term, with data fueling the courtship. It’s no longer enough to have a great product — it needs to be coupled with a great service. Service is at the heart of any user experience, and designers are crafting this experience, forging the connections between products and consumers. Read more…