 In this video you'll learn everything about the super cool joint futures conference that is taking place on September 3rd, 4th and 5th, 2019 in Helsinki. I've invited one of the main conference organizers, Angelo's Arnis, to tell us everything about this conference which is all about doing, enabling and directing design. The reason why I've invited Angelo's is because among the lineup of 28 speakers are also a few service designers so I want to know everything about what's going on at this conference. If you stick around till the end, Angelo's also shares a discount code which allows you to get a ticket for the conference at a more affordable price. So make sure you stick around till the end. Without any further ado, let's jump straight into the chat with Angelo's. Welcome to the show Angelo's. Thank you very much for having me here Mark. I'm really excited to learn everything I can about this conference, the joint futures conference and your demand who can tell me everything about it. And the first question that I had on my mind is like, is there a main theme this year? Yes, so the conference has an overarching theme that is it's called holistic design. And what that means is that our goal is to have a multi-angled approach to design and the different avenues that design operates. And we identify those avenues as craft, which is the design doing. There's operations which is enabling design. And then there is a strategy which is actually directing design. So craft, ops and strategy. Craft, ops and strategy. That's a really interesting mix with which you don't hear that often in one conference. This is the second year you're actually organizing a conference. How is this year's conference different than what you did last year? Yeah, so last year we created this conference about design systems. It was called Design Systems Conference, or this come for short. And we saw in Helsinki roughly 450 people that came in to see talks about design systems. We had speakers like Gina Ann, Nathan Curtis, Haley Hughes, who was working then in IBM, now working in Airbnb, and then Karis Arlene, who was also working at Airbnb at that time. And we also had local speakers who gave us perspective of local versus global approach of what's happening in design systems. And we had a very good confidence. People were really happy about it and they kept asking us, so when is the next conference going to happen? And we kept asking the same question to ourselves. And so we realized that since there are already conferences about design systems, like clarity in the US which is the biggest conference about design systems, we observed that the talks that all the conferences have, they connect somehow in saying the story line of design systems are for people. They are solving collaboration issues between designers and developers and conflict cost efficiency and all that. And we saw that design systems as a subject, if we did the next conference, would simply perhaps not be enough for us. So we needed to take a look of what is design systems, what kind of thing do they need in the background in order for them to work better. And we soon realized that design systems need, for example, operations in order to be more efficient and to solve those issues of collaboration and all that. And they also need a strategy in order to have a strong leadership in the background to make sure that designers get what they need to make their work better. And so we realized that we need to take this approach of seeing things from, let's say, from a bird's eye view in order to understand what is it. And it's not only design systems, of course, when it comes to craft, to doing design, actually, there's a lot of different things. I was checking your speakers list. I saw that there were 28 different speakers for keynotes. Also, at least one service designer with a title service designer on your list, what kind of people have you invited this year? What can people expect in terms of talks, presentations? Yeah, so as you said, we have 29 speakers from all over the world, basically. Yes, there's this one talk that is actually it has two speakers in. So it's one picture, but there's two people. So we have 29 speakers. We have, as you said, four keynotes. It's Mike Monteiro, Priya Prakash, Kim Goodwin, and Doritan Still, who are our keynotes. We have six high level workshops that are happening on the last day of the conference. And yeah, go ahead. Yeah, yeah. So what is the mix between the speaker service designers, design systems? Yeah, so we have a variety of subjects. As we said, we want to see design in a holistic approach. So we have topics like ethics, social change, human center design, service design, design systems, which are of course still relevant, collaboration between designers and developers or designers themselves, designing for children and ethics around designing for children, research, content strategy, what have you. Super cool. A lot of it's a mixed set of speakers with the open arching term, enabling design, right? You also mentioned something briefly about workshops. That's on the last day of the conference, right? What are the workshops about? How does that work? Yeah, so the workshops are six workshops that are curated by Rosenfeld Media. We partnered with them to help us in curating those. And they also basically run through this concept of craft operations and strategy. So we have two workshops that they are running about craft. Then there's two workshops that they're focusing mostly on operations. And then there's two workshops that they focus on strategy as well. Do you have a picture of who your ideal visitor is? Because I can imagine last year where people interested in design systems. Who are you aiming for this year? Who will find this conference really super interesting? Yeah, so of course everyone is welcome first of all. But since we touched so many subjects around design, I think naturally designers are a core target for us. That's the first thing. And then I would say product managers, for example, it's a good fit. It's another example that we want to attract because they might have questions like trying to understand the needs of designers and how can they as their top line managers, for example, how can they make them help them do their work more efficiently, for example. But also executives is one target group that might interest us as well. Who perhaps they're thinking of answering questions like what is the value of design and why do we need to make this investment a heavy investment on design, perhaps and why does it have to be equal with the investments that we make towards development and things like that. So I think those three groups are something that we try to target as as much as possible. Designers, product managers and executives, right? That's what is the thing that's my favorite question usually? What is the thing that you're looking forward to the most? Because I know how hectic it is. You're all stressed and then getting making sure that this train rides. What is the thing you're looking forward to? I would say, you know, seeing it happen. That's the first thing because we have a tiny team and we work very hard to create this confidence. I usually like to say that conferences are a logistic nightmare. So there's a lot of moving pause that we have to solve and we have to make sure that they fit into place at the right time. And there's a lot of work to be done and we have done also in the past. So seeing it happen and seeing people going away perhaps after the last day of the conference and being happy with what they got, I think that's the most important and it's a big reward I think from my point of view. There's no monetary reward that can satisfy you as much as people saying that, oh my god, this was a good conference. I'm sure that will happen. I'm really excited. Maybe who knows? Maybe I'll even see if I can come over. Speaking of coming over, if people want to sign up, are there still tickets left? How do we sign up? Yeah, so there are tickets left. People can go to joinfuturesconf.com slash tickets. But previously I would also, of course, advise if people do not know about the conference, just go through our program and check it out. It is a full program now. So we have all the slots that we wanted to get filled. So check the program, check the workshops and then go to the tickets part of the website and purchase one. And we actually have a discount for you and your show, which is a service design show, just one word service design show that you can put there in the discount and you will get a 10% off from your ticket. Awesome. That's a generous gift. Thank you for that community. The service design community will be happy with that. Angelo, I'm really looking forward to hearing the stories after the conference. Who knows? Maybe we'll do an aftermath or something like that. Thanks for sharing. Thank you for having me. Yeah. Enjoy the conference yourself and yeah, have fun. Thank you. Thank you so much, Mark. If Angelo's got you interested in the conference and you'd like to learn more and maybe even get your tickets head over to joinfuturesconf.com and I'll also add the links down below in the show notes. If this is your first time here on this channel, make sure to click the subscribe button as we'll be bringing and covering all the major service design conferences this year. So you don't want to miss that. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.