UX events: Celebrating five years of Collaborate Bristol

This year, Collaborate Bristol – the South West’s leading UX and design conference – turns five as we return to Bristol’s Watershed on Friday 21st June for what’s sure to be another amazing event.

To celebrate our fifth birthday, we’ve taken a look back at our five most popular talk videos over the years. Enjoy!

1. If Socrates Had Siri – Pete Trainor

In 2016, Pete Trainor graced the Collaborate stage with a moving and thought provoking talk that urges us to question how it feels to be more human in a digital world.

Pete confronts the challenges of designing for Natural Language Experiences and shares his vision for solving problems and societal challenges, using NLI as the interface for Ai.

2. Practicing UX in an agile environment – Vicky Brown

This talk comes from Nomensa’s own UX Manager and Principal Consultant, Vicky Brown.

Vicky explores the challenges and opportunities of integrating UX within a dev-led agile team and shares her experiences of building a government grants funding platform. This talk is packed with practical tips on how to keep your user-centred vision on track when you’re sitting next to your stakeholders, holding your own in a team of 20 developers, and the dangers of being too close to your product.

3. Graft, Craft and Being Daft – Gavin Strange

Next up is another talk from 2016 – and a speaker that will be joining us again this year – Aardman’s Gavin Strange.

In his talk ‘Graft, Craft and Being Daft’ Gavin shares his passion and giddy excitement at how lucky we are to be creatives and how many unexpected directions it can take you in.

If you find yourself stuck in a creative rut, lacking inspiration or just feel like getting over-excited about the industry we work in, this talk is for you.

4. Revolutions: How UX is helping shape the future of renewable energy – Matt Corrall and Matt Chequer

What on earth has UX got to do with wind turbines? Well, quite a lot actually. In this talk, Matt Corrall and Matt Chequer describe their journey from a fragmented and isolated group of developers to a trusted network of innovative and influential professionals, with UX at the core of everything we do.

Through experimentation, undercover work, a willingness to disrupt and one or two false starts, they learned to meld the best of UX and agile practices, unravel tangled, 20 year old software architecture and win over even our most adamant sceptics.

5. Why Machine Learning Needs Diversity To Make The Best Products – Felicia Williams

Felicia Williams – Creative Strategist at Facebook – opened up the conference with a fantastic talk on the importance of having diverse teams when designing machine learning systems. After all, what we build is often a reflection of the teams which build them.

In this talk you’ll hear stories of opportunities missed and success achieved when diverse teams come together and make technological magic.

These are just some of our Collaborate Bristol highlights and we’re looking forward to more this year!