Mike Monteiro Will Be the Closing Keynote at CanUX 2018

An epic closing keynote is on deck for 2018.

 How To Build An Atomic Bomb
} Nov 4, 2018   1:05pm / 55 mins

We were supposed to build a better world. Design and technology was supposed to point the way towards utopia. Instead, we designed a nightmare. Find out why this was our fault and what you can do to help fix it.

 W0: Design Ethics
} Nov 1, 2018   9:00am / 8 Hours

Like every other human being on the planet we share, designers are part of the social contract. By choosing to be a designer you are choosing to affect the people who come in contact with your work. Learn how to tell if your work will hurt or help those people and how to measure social impact alongside shareholder value.

What You’ll Learn:
You’re responsible for what you put into the world. Every choice you make, whether working for yourself or working for someone else, needs to take that into consideration. This workshop will teach you the basic principles of working ethically. We’ll go over how to measure social impact as a key metric, how to tell if you’re designing something dangerous, and how to tell the people who hired you they’re designing something dangerous. The effect of what you put into the world needs to be a consideration in your work.

Who Should Come?
If you’ve ever thought face recognition was a good idea, you should come. If you’ve ever thought corner bodegas need to be disrupted, you should come.
Seriously if you’re reading this, you should come. If you work in tech, you should come. If you’re just getting started in your career, you should definitely come. And if you manage people, you should’ve been here yesterday.
Also, I aim to have a very diverse crowd at each workshop.

What The Day Looks Like:
This workshop is highly interactive and conversational, proceeding through a series of challenging questions and dialogues—as Socrates intended. We review ten basic tenets of working ethically and confront the realities of putting them into practice, including the distractions and temptations every designer faces.

 Speaker Bio: Mike Monteiro

Mike Monteiro is the co-founder and design director of Mule Design, a San Francisco-based interactive design studio he created because, in his own words, he was “a terrible employee”. He prefers elegant, simple sites with clear language that serve a real need. He prefers that designers (and design books) have strong spines.

Mike writes frequently about the craft and business of design in the official Mule blog, and is one of the most memorable speakers on the design conference circuit. In early 2011, he gave a Creative Mornings talk entitled “F— You, Pay Me” that uplifted the downtrodden the world over, and got designers to start minding their business. His 2014 talk “How Designers Destroyed the World”, about designers and social responsibility, was awarded 2014 Talk of the Year by Net Magazine.

He loves client services so much he wrote two books on the topic. His first book, Design Is a Job, published in 2012, about handling yourself professionally as a designer, is being incorporated as a textbook in design programs across the country. His second book, You’re My Favorite Client, looks at the client/designer relationship from the client’s side, and deals with how to find the right designer, work better with them, and manage their moody selves. If you’re lucky, we’ll give a few of these away during CanUX.

In short, Mike is a design superhero. To confirm that hypothesis, he crashed a Plymouth Volaré station wagon into a tree, and walked away without a single bruise. For real. We’re actually a bit scared of the dude.

For more info, you can follow Mike on on Twitter @monteiro. And if you do, be forewarned, he truly despises guns and fascists… (don’t we all?).

*Image credit: AIGA & Frank Aymami