When we first got our hands on computers, we weren’t concerned as much about how they looked as opposed to what they could do to make our lives better. Same goes for the early days of the web, when simply publishing something that anyone in the world could read was a treat. But now that computers and connectivity are ubiquitous, design is a vital part of how the best hardware, software, services, and systems are created: good design is the difference between products that make our lives better and those that make our lives more difficult.
We’ve brought together some of the best design-oriented minds we could find to share their insights at RoadMap 2012, starting a little later on Monday in San Francisco. It’s an impressive roster of speakers, including former Apple executive Tony Fadell, now reinventing the way we think about home automation with Nest; Perry Chen, co-founder and CEO of Kickstarter and a new way to find grass-roots support for new projects; John Maeda, who is currently teaching the next generation of talented minds how to think about design as president of the Rhode Island School of Design; and Evan Willams, one of the founders behind a simple idea — Twitter — that has changed the world with its intuitive design and the current CEO of Obvious Corp.
We’ll be updating this page with live coverage from the event written by GigaOM’s talented team of writers, and a live stream of the event can also be found here. It all gets started at 8:30am Monday with opening remarks from GigaOM founder Om Malik and Senior Writer Katie Fehrenbacher, who organized the event. Please join the conversation on Twitter by following @gigaom and using the #roadmapconf hashtag.
- Product makers must tell a good toy story to stay focused
- Instagram CEO: Sandy was probably Instagram’s biggest moment
- Yves Behar: Connectedness is what design does best
- A beautiful design and no jerks: how Tumblr did it
- If you think your car is smart and connected now, just wait
- What makers of the ‘learning thermostat’ learned to redesign Nest
- Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen: We don’t ever want to sell this company
- Good design can improve leadership by making big data accesible
- Scott Wilson: Minimal’s new app will pay fans to sell its products
- Stores aren’t for selling, they are for delighting your customers
- Born to help make the rent, AirBnB grew from good design
- The future of e-commerce is both online and offline
- Nike’s Olander: “Democratizing sports data a tremendous opportunity”
- Pinterest CEO: We’re competing to keep your attention
- Ev Williams on Medium: We’d rather be HBO than mass market programming
- Don’t laugh: Code for America thinks government can be beautiful
- SoundCloud dreams of a day when you can talk to the internet
