Thread by @RohanIrvine

The opening keynote is Lauren Currie, @Redjotter presenting 'Desiging Tomorrow'
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Lauren went to the Melbourne museum on her first day here to understand the complex history of Australia. Lauren acknowledges the Wurundjeri people as the traditional owners of the land we gather today and pays her respect to elders present past and emerging.
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Design communities love to put people in narrow definitions of what and how we design.

Our gift as designers is out complexity and how we respond to problems.

Design would be better if we stopped putting ourselves in boxes.

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The common thread through Lauren's career is activism. She's interested in who creates the design we are forced to use. They're overwhelmingly male & pale. What would the world look like if mother's had more control of the spaces we design.

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Lauren is dedicated to everyday boring acts of activism.

Giving people seats who look like they need it more. Moving out of the way on the street. Saying thank you to service workers.

These are small things you can commit to do regardless of the system.
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The quality of perseverance is what you build and choose to do with those small acts.

Look at the things you do everyday and infuse them with progressive values.

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Lauren will talk to us about three topics:

Power
Prototyping
Change

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Lauren invited 4 guests on stage with her.

Jasha, a product designer, who's spoken Infront of a small team at work. She's terrified of the crowd size and Lauren has brought her on stage to get comfortable me with the size and one day share her story.

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Yilu is here to experience the stage without pressure of performing so that one day she can share her experiences.

Ashlie is here to take a step towards finding confidence to speak with more people.

Anna is here to conquer her fears, share her voice to share her vision.

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Upfront is a movement where Lauren is making conferences more diverse by bringing underrepresented voices to share the stage with her without the pressure to perform. Our conferences are over represented by older white men.

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Lauren wants stages to amplify voices that are hidden and show the diversity of power that exists.

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Lauren has always cared about how she can use her design skills to make Scotland a better place. She steamed of being the next Steve Jobs, but then she discovered service design.
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Service design allowed her to explore how to create systems, and how could her skills at creating systems make Scotland a better place.
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Lauren cofounded Snook to bring service design to Scotland.

One of the projects was: how can we make our relationship with police better?

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Lauren wanted to fix the broken relationship that Scotland had with sugar.

She invisioned having a know sugar shop where people could come and learn about.

They prototyped a shop 'Know Sugar' in a shopping centre with 700 visits.

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People found out they had underestimated how much sugar they were consuming and 100's took the no sugar pledge after the experience.

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Knowsugar.org is the website for the project.

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Taking prototypes offline can have massive impact. The UK government were spending 250m pounds and were blown away with what could be achieved with a prototype and two days.

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The business models that charities in the UK have worked on for decades changed with privacy laws that dictated what you could do with consumer data.

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Lauren was brought in to work with charities to create 250m pounds in revenue every year.
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The charity sector has a unique advantage of authenticity, Lauren created experience-something-different.org where you can buy experiences with different charities and the funds went back to that charity.

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These were project by @GoodLabsUK

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54k women lose their jobs every year for being pregnant.

1/5 mothers experience comments or harassment at work.

Lauren is part of 'Pregnant then screwed' working for mother's rights.

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Lauren is now part of nobl.io with the mission to make work better.

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As consultants trying to tackle to problem of toxic working environments Lauren sees the same problems throughout industries & companies.

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Nobl was founded that a good working environments are a fundamental human right.

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Service Design is evolving into the 3rd phase.

Design Systems and cultures.

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Design should serve a purpose and as strategy, so why do we draw the same boxes in every organisation?

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We encourage failed product ideas but we punish failed ways of working.

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It is as important to design how you work with people in you team, not just what you create.

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As you add more people to teams decision making slows. Some people decide the highest paid person decides.

We think there's one way to make decisions, but it doesn't have to be.

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Lauren has created 'Decider' a chat bot that can help facilitate good decision making within teams.

We often do the pause to reflect on how we make decisions and what our role is in the process.

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'We can change the world by making organisations better places'

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How do you make teams within organisations help organisations make better decisions?

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Craig Reynolds is trying to simulate birds flocking to understand the decision making process. He thought it would be extremely complex with many rules. He discovered the opposite, all that was needed was:

Separation
Alignment
Cohesion

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Lauren has made this:

Local, simple and shared rules

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Lauren asked the audience to share their local simple and shared rules are

@RuthEllison shares back some rules of the house: 'no surprises'

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Lauren's organisation rules:
1. Steer towards your customer
2. Steer towards internal alignment
3. Steer towards autonomy

Take these back to your team, have the conversation, share it back with Lauren.

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All these conversations have given Lauren power. Old power was gaurded and hoarded. New power is like water, flowing and fluid.

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Share your power.

You have a responsibility to believe in others and make their path easier, instead of building a podium for yourself.

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Aluren allows the space between where she is, and where she was talking to be, to be less frightening.

It's important to be honest, and be honest with yourself.

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We are all victims of the Fraud Police who you think will rock up in the middle of night and the you 'We have a shot tonne of evidence that you're not qualified'

We must beat the fraud police.

We must recognise our privilege, and choose what we do with it.

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It doesn't have to be negative.

Use your privilege to lift people who do the have it.

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Change happens from the bottom up. If we wait for a design body to change the underrepresentation it will never change.

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When Lauren was sick of being the only women on stage-again-she put a post it not in the women's bathroom asking 'what women do you want to see speaking?'

The conversations she had with women lead to prototyping 'up front' and helping women be more comfortable on stage

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Lauren is sharing videos from people who are part of up front and how it's started to help them be more comfortable.

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If you sit on stage without any pressure to perform you're 30% more likely to present.

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Lauren then created a training course to help people be more confident.

It's based on vulnerabilty and defining what confidence means to you.

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Behaviour is better than words.

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Don't talk about diversity. Read and learn from diverse people. Cite diverse people in your talks.

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At home,
if you're a man, do more
If you're a woman, do less
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At UX Australia
Don't ask what you do
Ask about your story

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Remember your local and share rules
Share your power
Togetherness is our strength

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We're all on this together!

Stop worrying about what other think, you'll be so much freed to tackle the things that matter.

We're closing with a round of applause for the up front stage members.

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Excellent opening keynote!!!!! Thanks so much @Redjotter!

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