Design for the Utopia You Want, Not the Dystopia You're In

Updated on July 12, 2022
GOTO Amsterdam 2022
Chris Atherton
Chris Atherton

Pragmatic interaction designer and content consultant with extensive experience from digital product and service development

We make digital stuff, but we also consume digital stuff. While it is smart to remember that you are not the user, there is definitely value in thinking about your own experience as a user.

The wall between consuming and making is porous: the things we consume influence what we make, whether we intend them to or not.

Designer and former academic psychologist, Chris Atherton, will take a look at what it’s like to be alive and using digital stuff in 2021. What is dystopia, and how did it get into prod? What are we really learning when we use technology? Why is psychology from a century ago still relevant, and who are all the old white guys with beards? And what does any of this teach us about our own responsibilities as makers of technology?

Chris will take us back to basics and ask how we might re-evaluate perspectives from the last hundred years or so, in the increasingly uncomfortable glare of the internet. Armed with only a handful of memes and the desire to create good in the world, can we fix these interesting times?

In this talk, you'll learn:

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