We’re beyond excited that our fourth Roadmap conference — which highlights the intersection of tech, design and entrepreneurialism — kicks off tonight with an evening party, and will run Tuesday and Wednesday at the SF Jazz Center in the Hayes Valley neighborhood of San Francisco. My co-chair Om Malik and I spent this year convincing some of the brightest and most creative minds in the world of product and experience design (Tony Fadell, Evan Williams, Yves Behar) to come speak at Roadmap and our 45 plus speakers will no doubt inspire you.
This year our overarching theme is “invisible design,” which can mean a variety of things, including:
- As everything becomes connected and rich with data, design becomes the hidden connective tissue that determines how devices and services work. That makes product design increasingly valuable. As the infrastructure layer of technology (chips, radios, hardware production) becomes a commodity, how the user experiences a product captures more of the value.
- Product designers have long emphasized simplicity in user experience and in 2014 we’ve seen that even more, from Apple’s iOS 7 “flat design” to the “anti-design” user interfaces of new startups.
- As computing becomes increasingly embedded in our lives and on our bodies, the way we interact with computing will become increasingly natural and “invisible,” emphasizing UI’s like voice, gesture, facial expression and even AI’s that can predict our needs.
- Finally, as design becomes a core part of building tech businesses, design will stop being a silo division in a startup or tech company and will dissolve into the rest of the organization. While the idea of “design thinking” has been around for decades, startups and the tech industry are increasingly embracing this practice. All hail “the designer founder.”
Some of our speakers include:
- Tony Fadell, co-founder and CEO of Nest
- Evan Williams, co-founder of Medium, Twitter
- Yves Behar, founder of fuseproject
- KK Barrett, production designer, including for the movie Her
- Elle Luna, artist, designer
- Matias Duarte, Google’s VP Design, Android
- Julie Zhou, Director of Product Design for Facebook
- Jeff Veen, VP Adobe, Product
- Mia Blume, Product Design Manager, Pinterest
- Simon Rogers, Twitter’s first Data Editor
- Mark Rolston, founder and chief creative argodesign
- Hayes Raffle, Google X interaction designer
- Craig Mod, writer and designer
- John Maeda, Kleiner Perkin’s Design Partner
- Jessica Hische, letterer and type designer
- Parrish Hanna, Global Director for Human Machine Interface, Ford
- Dantley Davis, Director of Design, Netflix
- Gadi Amit, founder, NewDealDesign
- Reza Ali, media researcher and artist
- Shalin Amin, Creative Director, Uber
- Robert Brunner, founder Ammunition Partners
We’ve got a few tickets left, so grab yours here. In addition to the kick-off event tonight, we’ve also got an after party after day one, and some exclusive lunches and workshops attendees can sign up for. Come be inspired this week before the holidays kick in, and come have fun with us!
