Embracing the mess

We can’t share too much here because it’s still top secret, but we’ll be taking you behind the scenes of one of the product announcements from the opening keynote.

When Mina’s team moved away from a culture of 'design handoffs' to one of collaboration where everyone in the team works on all aspects of product development and engages with users regularly, they became more efficient, more user centric and much, much happier with the work that they do. In this session, Mina shares their journey and small actionable tips the team has picked along the way. You’ll leave inspired to start collaborating closely, to break down silos and end the 'design handoff' mindset.

We always say we want more diversity of thinking on our design processes, but how often we actually stop to listen to what a new generation of designers has to say or cares about? In this talk, Lucas will cover the importance of hiring junior designers, a few things he’s learned about design by working alongside them from diversity to craft, and how can we create a team culture that allows juniors to thrive.

Dylan and Vietanh will show a suite of Figma-powered design tools that let their team build out core and global Uber experiences. Without this infrastructure, it would have been impossible to build coherent design flows which let Uber user buy transit tickets in Denver, order a rickshaw in Bangalore, have local favorite Churrascaria delivered to your doorstep in São Paulo, and ship important consumer goods across the US during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In her talk, Julia will explain how her team tackled restructuring the design critiques everyone avoided before. She’ll share how different naming, living by example and the remote situation can have a huge (positive!) impact on how they perceive and enjoy a meeting that is about improving each other, themselves and their daily work.

In this session, Hugo will share his honest account of establishing a multi-platform design system; from the pie-in the sky ideas, to anchoring it firmly in trying to solve tangible problems. We’ll learn about Burberry’s Design System prior to THOMAS, the processes and governance required, the decision between starting multi-platform vs. single platform — and much more!

Often, we move too quickly to high fidelity, which stifles the creative process and keeps non-designers from engaging with the design process. Low fidelity design is great for pulling your entire team into the design process. It's the perfect medium to help your product, engineering, and design peers generate ideas that will amaze and delight you.

This talk covers methods for auditing the codebase of a product in order to create Styles and Components in Figma that most closely match the Truth of the UI components your real users interact with in Production.

In this session you’ll learn how Headspace Product Design sustains a mindful and energized team while also building a product that promotes the same. You’ll leave with a handful of take-aways to bring back to their workplace and teams.

Lalo is a product designer at Quora’s Distribution team, which means his work is to design a product that helps the ML team understand what 300+ million users like and distribute the best content for them. When he joined, he found out that even though the design and ML teams both understood their roles, they didn’t have principles that would help them achieve their goals consistently. So, he’s spent the last few months coming up with those principles — we’re excited to hear about them at Config.

In this talk we will share how BIPOC designers from around the world are leveraging emerging technologies to explore design through play, create dope art, and connect the global design community.

Take a walk to the experimental edges of intelligent creative software with Jon. A meeting point of once disparate threads, we now see dots connected between decades of work in generative & parametric UI design, artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, decentralization, and communal collaboration. The tooling we'll be experimenting with is futuristic and yet we can use it today: our interdependent future already awaits us if we so choose.