A unique experience for design thinkers, makers, and leaders
Design Exchange: Collective has something for everyone, whether you're a mid- to senior-level creative, an engineer, emerging leader, or a seasoned executive. No matter your role, you can explore how your organisation can grow its design maturity with inspiring and engaging keynotes, breakout sessions, hands-on workshops, and conversations. You’ll dig into the skills, strategies, and issues critical to growing your team's impact through the lens of The New Design Frontier, InVision’s industry-spanning report that unpacks the relationship between design practices and business performance.
Wednesday, 2 October
TIME / LOCATION
SOUTH PIER AT JONES BAY WHARF
NORTH PIER AT
JONES BAY WHARF
PARKVIEW
SIGNORELLI
8:00 - 9:00
Registration open and breakfast available
     
9:00 - 10:00
 
 
Opening plenary session:
 
Kevin Walker, InVision
 
Nancy Douyon, Uber
 
 
10:00 - 11:00
Networking refreshment break
     
11:00 - 12:30
 
Richard Banfield, InVision
(Registration required)
Eli Woolery, InVision
(Registration required)
Emily Campbell, InVision
(Registration required)
12:30 - 1:30
Lunch at South Pier
     
1:30 - 3:30
 
Richard Banfield, InVision
(Registration required)
Eli Woolery, InVision
(Registration required)
Emily Campbell, InVision
(Registration required)
3:30 - 4:00
Afternoon refreshment break
 
Afternoon refreshment break (also available outside Parkview and Signorelli)
Afternoon refreshment break (also available outside Parkview and Signorelli)
4:00 - 5:30
 
Richard Banfield, InVision
(Registration required)
Eli Woolery, InVision
(Registration required)
Emily Campbell, InVision
(Registration required)
5:30 - 8:00
Opening night happy hour at Jones Bay Wharf
     
Thursday, 3 October
TIME / LOCATION
SOUTH PIER AT JONES BAY WHARF
NORTH PIER AT JONES BAY WHARF
PARKVIEW
SIGNORELLI
8:00 - 9:00
Breakfast
     
9:00 - 10:30
 
 
Rebecca Kerr, InVision
10:30 - 11:00
Morning refreshment break
 
Morning refreshment break (also available outside Parkview and Signorelli)
Morning refreshment break (also available outside Parkview and Signorelli)
11:00 - 12:30
 
Eli Woolery, InVision
 
Building Collaboration and Consensus: Practical Tools for Successful Design Systems Implementation
Natalya Shelburne, The New York Times
Emily Campbell, InVision
12:30 - 1:30
Lunch at South Pier
     
1:30–3:00
 
Aarron Walter, InVision; Kristeen McCarthy, Suncorp Group; Melissa Robertshaw, Coles Group; Chi Ryan, PwC Digital
Eli Woolery, InVision; Nancy Douyon, Uber; Alexa Herasimchuk, Zendesk; Ben Hersh, Dropbox
3:00 -  3:45
Afternoon networking refreshment break
     
3:45 - 4:45
 
Closing plenary session:

The Creation and Impact of Emotionally Intelligent Teams
Natalya Shelburne, The New York Times
 
Design Maturity, Practices, and Empowerment
Emily Campell, InVision
   
Workshops
Workshop registration is required.
Product Design Strategy
Richard Banfield, VP, Design Transformation, InVision
High-performing design teams are structured around the customer value they deliver. In this workshop, we'll explore how these exceptional teams align themselves with vision, values, and practices to ensure they can create the ideal cross-functional working environments and delivery paths.
Design Systems for People
Emily Campbell, Senior Design Specialist, InVision
You spent months building your design system. Your audits were thorough. The style guide is up to date, and your library of reusable UI components is a thing of beauty. And then, when you finally share your design system across your organization, nobody bothers to use it. Frustrating, right? Don’t fret—there’s hope yet. Over the course of this workshop, you’ll learn how to rally your team around your design system by streamlining communication, boosting silo-busting collaboration, and cultivating a culture defined by unified purpose. You’ll explore empathetic research techniques that create a better understanding of stakeholder needs, hear how to make processes more inclusive, and learn governance structures rooted in shared ownership.
Democratising the Power of Design
Eli Woolery, Director of Design Education, InVision
Designers understand the power of design in shaping great products, but it can be challenging to get other teams and stakeholders to buy into the design process if they haven’t experienced the benefits first-hand. Design thinking offers a toolkit that can help democratize design, and get teams aligned early in the process of creating a new product or feature.
In this workshop, we’ll take a look at how design thinking has helped shape innovative products in a multitude of industries, and then have a hands-on, team based design challenge where we use the methods in the design thinking toolkit to attack a creative problem. By the end of our workshop, you should be able to bring these methods back to your team, and share the power of the design process to help create more innovative, impactful products.
Sessions and talks
Leveling Up Your Design Communication: Creating a Culture of Feedback  
Aarron Walter, VP, Design Education, InVision
Design is a medium for communication, and to do it well, we must cultivate our own communication skills. Within design teams, we do our best work when we create a culture of feedback shaped by our creative space and our design review process. Beyond the design tribe, our work thrives when it’s communicated in language that aligns to the goals of the business and invites participation early and often. In this presentation, Aarron will share the experiences of real design teams at Apple, Spotify, and other organizations to show how to improve the communication of design both inside your team and with key outside stakeholders. You’ll see how to run effective design reviews and retrospectives which will help you create a culture of feedback that produces better work, helps designers sharpen their skills, and communicates the value of design by making it more transparent and inviting.
Every Product Has a Voice 
Ben Hersh, Product Designer, Dropbox
When you read the words scattered over an app or website, you experience them as if spoken. This voice is every bit as real as color or motion on a digital screen—it’s an illusion, and it’s there for you to design. Words are often the most important design element in a product, but designers rarely handle them with the same care or conviction that we have for visual patterns. We can do better. Ben will share simple guiding principles to help you design better with words through lessons and inspiration in neuroscience, fairy tales, and examples from across the web.
One Foot in Both Camps: Designer/Engineering Hybrids
Jack Lo Russo, Front-end Developer, GROW Super
If you're working on building a digital product, you've probably heard the term "unicorn" thrown around in reference to someone who can both design and code, and you've likely been dragged into at least one "designers should code" argument. If this kind of talk rubs you the wrong way, trust me—you're not alone.Yet, it's also very likely that you or somebody on your team has skills that don't fall cleanly into a neat and tidy box as either a designer or engineer. In an industry that tends to form silos around Design and Engineering, where do hybrids fit in? What should we call them? How can we embrace and grow cross-functional collaboration in our organisations? In this talk, Jack shares his experience navigating a career as a design/dev hybrid, some thoughts on what makes a healthy team, and how we should think about the role of engineering in the design process.
Making Tech More Efficient Through Informed International Insights  
Nancy Douyon, Design Ethicist & Product Philosopher, Uber
Every design decision has the potential to include or exclude customers. Global research emphasizes the contribution that understanding user diversity makes to informing these decisions, and thus to including as many people as possible. User diversity covers variation in capabilities, needs, and aspirations. At Uber, the Global Scalable Research program is intended to influence product teams at HQ and around the world, to design and test in global regions—currently Mexico, India, Brazil. I’ll discuss how we use Global Research to prioritize what product teams really need to build well and understand if their designs have relative ease of use that translates well to non-US users. Our Global Research priorities addresses some of the most challenging problems facing our global users today.
The Business Impact of Design
Kevin Walker, VP Enterprise Marketing, inVision
The best brands in the world—organisations like Amazon, Starbucks, IBM, and McKinsey—have embraced design as a critical component of corporate strategy. They apply design methodologies not just to develop products, but also to boost engineering efficiency, to decrease time to market, and to capture greater market share. But business leaders and design leaders struggle to measure the multi-dimensional impact of design on business growth. Using the results from InVision's groundbreaking The New Design Frontier report, a study of more than 2,200 design organisations around the world, we'll explore the nexus of design practice, team connectivity, and business growth.
Words Matter: Speaking the Language of Business and Development Partners  
Rebecca Kerr, Senior Enterprise Content Specialist, InVision
Language barriers aren't exclusive to foreign travel; we face them every day when we communicate with our busiess or development partners. This session emphasizes the importance of meeting at the intersection of motivations and ideas by using words that resonate. We will explore situations where business and design aren't always speaking the same language and will highlight tactics that create empathy and lead to better outcomes. You'll uncover the why behind speaking a mutual language, understand tactics for listening and translating the words of our partners, and learn ways to navigate conversations that lead to better outcomes.
Designing to Transform: From Cargo Cults to Creative Systems
Emily Campbell, Senior Design Specialist, InVision
As design expands its reach into new territories, disciplines, and technologies, we need to update our toolset to match the emerging complexity of the problems spaces we’re navigating. Transformation Design melds design and system thinking, using design methods to understand and affect systems of communication and behavior. This isn’t a new discipline or process, but a new way of thinking about what we already know: how to recognize signals of change, to discover the networks that exist within a space and amplify our work through them, and to respect and center upon the human behavior at the heart of any system structure.
Building a Compelling Business Case for a Design System
Laura Van Doore, Head of Product Design, Fathom
Today most designers and product teams have come to the conclusion that the benefits of a design system outweigh the potential loss of design freedom. If they haven't already, they're ready to take the next step toward a more consistent and efficient future. But it’s not designers who need to be convinced to invest in the build of a design system, particularly if they aren’t lucky enough to be in an organisation where design holds the proverbial, yet elusive, ‘seat at the table’. We need to focus on convincing the people who set the budgets and allocate resources by communicating the cost vs. benefit of the initiative. The aim of this session is to empower designers and developers with the right tools mindset to effectively sell a design system project to the business decision makers within their organisation.
Panel Conversation: Design Leadership
Aarron Walter, VP, Design Education, InVision; Kristeen McCarthy, Head of Digital Experience Design, Suncorp Group; Melissa Robertshaw, Head of Design & Digital Services, Coles Group; Chi Ryan, Experience Strategy Director, PwC Digital
Join moderator Aarron Walter, VP, Design Education at InVision for a conversationwith three design leaders from some of Australia's most recognisable organisations: Kristeen McCarthy, Head of Digital Experience Design, Suncorp Group; Melissa Robertshaw, Head of Design & Digital Services, Coles Group; Chi Ryan, Experience Strategy Director, PwC Digital. The discussion will range from scaling design to growing teams and hiring, to cross-functional collaboration and advocating for the value of design within complex enterprises.
Panel Conversation: Developing Impactful Careers in Design, Product, and Tech
Eli Woolery, Director of Design Education, InVision; Nancy Douyon, Product Ethicist and Philosopher, Uber; Alexa Herasimchuk, Senior Product Designer, Zendesk; Ben Hersh, Product Designer, Dropbox
Moderator Eli Woolery, Director of Design Education at InVision will host a conversation with on intentional career-pathing, developing diverse talent in yourself and others, building management skills, the ethics and impact of our work as product designers and developers, and much more. You'll hear from panelists from some of the world's most design-forward companies: Nancy Douyon, Product Ethicist and Philosopher, Uber; Alexa Herasimchuk, Senior Product Designer, Zendesk; Ben Hersh, Product Designer, Dropbox.
Designers and Developers in Cars Getting Coffee: Building Trust and a Better Connected Workflow Between Designers and Developers
Eli Woolery, Director of Design Education, InVision
As designers, we’re trained to listen to our customer’s needs, and build products that delight them. But how often do we turn these skills inward, to our own teams? The designer/developer relationship can be especially fraught. Lack of empathy can  create friction between teams, which slows down the product design process and often results in sub-par experiences for customers. We’ve spent the past year talking to a diverse set of design leaders, across industries, and learned some tactics and insights to sand off the rough edges in communication, and create a better, more connected workflow between teams. As a bonus, we’ll also share some lessons we’ve learned in bringing design thinking and design sprints into Agile workflows, and we’ll end with a Q&A which includes Aarron Walter, VP of Design Education, around these topics.
Speakers
VP, Design Transformation
InVision

Richard is a design thinking, strategy, and UX expert who authored Enterprise Design Sprints, and...(read more)

Director, Experience Strategy
InVision
Emily is a veteran design and product practitioner. She is currently the director of Experience Stra...(read more)
Design Ethicist & Product Philosopher
Douyon Signature
Nancy Douyon is Global Design Ethicist & Product Philosopher. She is a trailblazer in human experien...(read more)
Senior Product Designer
Zendesk
Alexa Herasimchuk is a Senior Product Designer on the Billing team at Zendesk where she is focu...(read more)
Product Designer
Dropbox
Ben Hersh designs to make the world a more thoughtful and creative place. He is currently with Dropb...(read more)
Front End Developer
GROW Super
Jack is a Front End Developer at Grow Super, but he hasn't always been on this side of the fence—he ...(read more)
Head of Digital Experience Design & Activation
Suncorp Group
Kristeen’s path to her current role began only 4 years ago. Following over 20 years working in audi...(read more)
Head of Design & Digital Services
Coles Group
Melissa Robertshaw is the Head of Design & Digital Services for Coles Group and is passionate about ...(read more)
Experience Strategy Director
PwC Digital
Chi Ryan is a design and creative practitioner, writer, coach, speaker and leader, who specialises i...(read more)
Software Engineer
The New York Times
Natalya Shelburne is a developer, designer, educator, speaker, and artist. She is a software enginee...(read more)
Head of Product Design
Fathom
Laura is the Head of Product Design at Fathom, a financial analysis product in the cloud accounting ...(read more)
VP, Design Education
InVision
As the VP of Design Education at InVision, Aarron Walter draws upon 15 years of experience running p...(read more)
Senior Director of Design Education
InVisionApp
Eli is the Director of Design Education at InVision. His design career spans both physical and digit...(read more)