Schedule

Technology was never neutral: its social, political, and ethical impacts have recently become painfully clear. The stakes are only going to get higher as connected cameras watch the city, algorithms take over society’s most important decisions, and transport, jobs, and even warfare become automated. The tech industry needs to earn the trust these technologies demand.

Drawing on years of research for his new book Future Ethics, designer Cennydd Bowles will illuminate the moral challenges that lie ahead for technologists, and discuss how practitioners and companies can create more thoughtful, ethical products for future generations.

A Design System is not just a product or a set of tools. To be successful, it needs to function as a service that puts people at its heart. A Design system is only as good as the community it represents.

How do we empower colleagues from across government to contribute? How do we support users who work with different tech stacks and templating languages? How can we enable collaboration between interaction designers, frontend developers, content designers, etc? We need to make sure that whatever we make is inclusive and works for most users. In this way, we are enabling the system to grow, evolve and sustain itself over time, not depending on a solo team but on an entire cross government community. This is key to the success of the GOV.UK Design System, it also has not been easy. Come and learn about some of the challenges we’ve faced and how we managed to overcome them.

People too often think accessibility is just about ramps and Braille. But it covers a much wider area - helping people with mental illnesses, learning difficulties, neurodevelopmental disorders - and, crucially, "normal" people! Almost every improvement you make for a particular group helps everyone outside that group as well. So many access improvements can be so easily made - from having a photo of the door of your building on your website, to help people find it, or telling people when an event ends as well as starts so they know how long they have to sit still! And when it comes to your employees, accessibility goes even further. It's not just about altering their environment so they can do their best work, it's about exploiting their unique gifts so they can truly shine.

When it comes to crafting layouts on the web, CSS Grid is more powerful than anything we’ve had available to us before. In this talk I’ll walk through an example of harnessing the power of Grid to build complex, responsive, two-dimensional components, and demonstrate how we can use CSS variables to keep our Grid code DRY, reusable and maintainable.

Services, APIs, events, and webhooks bring all sorts of possibilities for combining tools from around the web, but how far can we stretch things? What would happen if we made a Rube Goldberg machine for deploying our website, and what would we learn along the way?

JavaScript probably isn't the first language which springs to mind when you say 'machine learning', but that does seem to be changing, especially with the release of TensorFlow.js last year. This talk gives a high level overview of what machine learning and neural networks are, shows how to get started with TensorFlow.js, and demos a number of projects which use JavaScript and AI.

What we learned from making an AR-only game

We thought we could port our existing game to an AR experience. We couldn't. Here's what happened and everything we learned.

In this talk I'll take the audience through the journey we went on creating our first AR-only experience. Our game Conduct AR! I'll talk about how many of the assumptions we had going in turned out to be wrong and how we worked to change them in a race to launch alongside iOS 11.

You'll Learn

• What makes AR Special (hint: it's not what people think)
• What the biggest challenges are for AR apps and games
• What you need to consider when doing UI in AR
• What AR enables us to do right now, and what it doesn't (but might in the future)
• It'll be an explosive, entertaining and visual journey into one of the most exciting frontiers in technology today.