Events & Discussions Liz Danzico, Chair

What is the role of design in public services? How can these services utilize design principles to create more satisfying experiences for citizens and more cost-effective solutions for government? As cities recognize the need for innovation in the way they deliver services they are partnering with design-driven organizations to rethink the way public services are delivered. Join us as we host Chelsea Mauldin, Executive Director at The Public Policy Lab, to talk about the way the organization approaches new areas for investigation and working on exciting projects like the NYC Digital Playbook.

Chelsea is a social scientist and strategic designer who has built a career working to improve the lives of low-income and at-risk Americans. At The Public Policy Lab she focuses on using ethnographic research, human-centered design, rapid prototyping, and formative evaluation to help governments reimagine the way they deliver services. She has an MS in City Design and Social Science from the London School of Economics and a BA in social science and English from the University of California at Berkeley.

We live in a rapidly changing world. Design and technology are changing what it means to work and what roles we play in our society. What will work look like in the Twenty-first Century? Ryan Avent will look at how technology is affecting the economy, what workers can expect in future, and what challenges society can expect to face as we adjust to a digital world.

Ryan Avent is a senior editor and economics columnist at the Economist and the author of The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-first Century. He has covered developments in the world economy since 2007 and his work has been featured in New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, the Atlantic, Slate and the Guardian.

What is design like in startups of different sizes? What are common design challenges they face, and how have their investors supported them? What does a design partner in a venture capital firm do? What does Google Ventures think about design, and what is this Design Sprint process that they have promoted recently? Venture capital firms have recognized the importance of design to business success, and have recently added designers to their teams in the roles of design partners or designers in residence (GV itself has at least 6 partners from design backgrounds). Join us as we host Daniel Burka, design partner at Google Ventures, and ask him about everything above and more.

Daniel has spent more than a decade helping startups with product design. He co-founded Canadian web agency Silverorange, where he worked with a broad range of clients including Ning, the Canadian government, and Mozilla, where he helped design the Firefox brand. Daniel led the early stage of designs for Digg.com and spent five years as Digg’s creative director. He also co-founded the social network Pownce with Kevin Rose and served as director of design for Tiny Speck, a gaming startup that morphed into Slack! In April 2011 Daniel and Kevin co-founded the mobile incubator Milk, which was acquired by Google. He led mobile user experience for Google+ before becoming a partner at GV.

The Google Design team is a cooperative effort around design at Google, led by a group of designers, writers, and developers within the company. The team has garnered recognition for Material Design, a design language that reimagines what the "material" of digital interfaces is and how it behaves. Material Design has continued to evolve since then, with APIs for developers, and a new set of Motion guidelines. Join us as we talk to Rob Giampietro, Creative Lead at Google Design NY, and Bethany Fong, Senior Interaction Designer and Accessibility Lead, about design systems at the scale of Google, Material Design, and what's next for the team.

Virtual reality has taken the world of filmmaking by storm. How do you tell a story differently with VR than other technologies? What unique opportunities does it offer? What constraints exist? How do the lessons from filmmaking translate to the design of other products and experiences in this new realm of VR? Join us as we talk to Milica Zec and Winslow Porter, the creators of Giant, a virtual-reality (VR) short narrative that transports the viewer into the experience of a family struggling to survive in an active war zone. Giant draws from the experiences of Zec, who grew up in war-torn Serbia. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival's 2016 New Frontier exhibition.

Milica Zec is a New York City-based film and virtual reality director, editor, and screenwriter. Giant is her directorial debut in the virtual reality medium. Milica has been collaborating for 9 years with the performance artist Marina Abramovic on numerous projects, including MoMA’s The Artist is Present show, and the successful Kickstarter fundraising campaign for Marina Abramovic Institute, for which Milica directed and created ten videos.

Winslow Turner Porter III is a Brooklyn based director, producer and creative technologist, specializing in virtual reality and large-scale immersive experiential installations. Winslow has always been fascinated with the possibilities of how the intersection of art and technology can elevate storytelling. Winslow started out as a feature film editor, but pivoted into art/tech after Graduating from NYU Tisch’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) in 2010. With over six years of experiential work under his belt, he has helped create interactive art experiences for Google, Delta, Diesel, Merrell and Wired, to name a few. Winslow also produced the Tribeca Film Festival Transmedia Award-winning documentary CLOUDS, among other acclaimed new media projects. Since 2015, Winslow has been a member of NEW INC, the New Museum’s art, technology and design incubator program. Giant is Winslow’s 5th virtual reality project.

At the intersection of photography and data visualization is a place where optical techniques reveal complex phenomena and data viz starts to resemble a photographic process. PhotoViz investigates the opportunities and crossover between these two mediums and their value in a world overwhelmed by both data and photos.

Nicholas Felton spends much of his time thinking about data, charts and our daily routines. He is the author of many Personal Annual Reports that weave numerous measurements into a tapestry of graphs, maps and statistics reflecting the year’s activities. He was one of the lead designers of Facebook's timeline and the co-founder of Daytum.com. His most recent product is Reporter, an iPhone app designed to record and visualize subtle aspects of our lives. His work is a part of the permanent collection at MoMA. He has also been profiled by the Wall Street Journal, Wired and Good Magazine and recognized as one of the 50 most influential designers in America by Fast Company.