Dive deep into the big ideas shaping the future: 99U Master Classes are led by creative thinkers and doers changing the way we collaborate, innovate, tell stories, and pursue a more inclusive world.
Advance Breakout Session selection has closed. To make changes to your sessions, please visit the Information Desk at the conference.
Thursday, May 9: 3:00pm - 4:00pm & Friday, May 10: 9:45am - 10:45am
Hosted by: Forest Young, Head of Design and Global Principal, Wolff Olins
There’s a lot of anxiety around the future, from alarming dystopian prediction to the unrelenting appetite for “novelty” and “innovation.” In this master class, Wolff Olins’ Forest Young will provide a framework for designing a better future where everyone benefits, using case studies such as his work with Uber that reimagined accessibility and equitable mobility.
You’ll learn how creatives can leverage different approaches and philosophies to tease apart how to think about (or begin to think about) Future Design.
About Forest Young: Forest Young is a global design leader, educator and speaker. He is a Principal at Wolff Olins — which was recently named Fast Company’s Most Innovative Company for Design. Here, he leads initiatives for the world’s most influential companies and cultural institutions. Prior to joining Wolff Olins, Forest was the Executive Creative Director at West, leading design across a portfolio of early stage companies.
Forest is an MFA critic in graphic design at the Yale School of Art, where he is a distinguished alumnus and recipient of the Mark Whistler Prize. He recently served on the Board of Directors for AIGA/NY, and his work has been exhibited at MoMA, the Royal College of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery and at international biennials. He has received the industry’s highest design accolades including the Cannes Gold Design Lion and the ADC Black Cube.
Thursday, May 9: 3:00pm - 4:00pm & Friday, May 10: 9:45am - 10:45am
Hosted by:
Silka Miesnieks, Head of Emerging Design
Phil Clevenger, Senior Director, Experience Design
As technology continues to rapidly open new avenues for creatives, the topic of design ethics is increasingly important for design teams to consider and implement in their work. In this master class, leaders from the Adobe Design team will discuss ethical challenges posed by emerging technologies (including AI, augmented reality and voice interfaces), and dig into dark matters past, present, and future.
Attendees will learn how to recognize these challenges as they present, and walk away with an ethical principles framework for to use in their own projects.
About Adobe Design: Adobe Design is a dynamic, cohesive, global team of designers, researchers, prototypers, content strategists, program managers, and more who work across Adobe’s three product lines: Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, and Experience Cloud. They design the tools and services that Adobe customers use to create and communicate.
Thursday, May 9: 3:00pm - 4:00pm & Friday, May 10: 9:45am - 10:45am
Hosted by:
Jamal Dauda, Global Head of Music, WeTransfer
Karen van de Kraats, Senior Designer, WeTransfer
You know what nobody asked for? Another tech company blundering into ‘content marketing’ with a blog-by-numbers. So when WeTransfer decided to launch storytelling site WePresent in 2018, they were determined to do things differently. They wanted to rethink not just the types of stories told, but the way they told them. Content and design worked together from the very start, and things got weird (in a good way).
In this master class, WeTransfer Senior Designer Karen van de Kraats and Global Head of Music Jamal Dauda will get real about the mistakes they made and the lessons learned when launching and shaping WePresent. Plus, they’ll share their principles and process to ensure your own content and design teams build each other up and bring out the best in what we all care about: the work itself.
About WeTransfer: WeTransfer makes beautifully obvious tools to get your ideas moving. Founded in 2009 in Amsterdam as a simple, well-designed file sharing service for the creative community, WeTransfer has grown to include tools that scale across the creative spectrum, including editorial platform WePresent, mobile app ‘Collect by WeTransfer’, quick slide-making tool Paste, immersive sketching app Paper, and the original web platform with 43 million monthly users and over a billion files sent each month.
Thursday, May 9: 3:00pm - 4:00pm & Friday, May 10: 9:45am - 10:45am
Hosted by: Brian Collins, Chief Creative Officer, COLLINS
At any given moment, there are multiple, parallel futures fighting for dominance – emerging from science fiction, political parties, corporate visions, counter cultures, and more. But in all cases, they need design to compete and thrive.
Brian Collins, Chief Creative Officer of COLLINS, will present a new brand and design operating system based on more than a decade of research working with some of the world’s leading brands including Chobani, Dropbox, Equinox, Instagram, Microsoft, Nike, and Spotify.
Leveraging brand beliefs, company capabilities, and marketplace wants, this approach reimagines how an organization can use design to re-connect with people’s hope and make a leap into the future.
About Brian Collins: Brian Collins is a designer and educator. He is Chief Creative Officer of COLLINS, the strategy & experience design firm in San Francisco and New York. The firm was named by Forbes as a company transforming the future of brand building. Their work has been covered by The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Businessweek and The Wall Street Journal. In a survey of global companies, COLLINS was named one of “50 Places Creative People Would Kill To Work For” along with Disney, Tesla, Pixar and NASA. They were just named to the 2019 Ad Age A-List.
Brian has been a professor at the School of Visual Arts since 2001. He was made Distinguished Alumnus of the Massachusetts College of Art in 2004 and received an Honorary Doctorate from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California in 2008. Fast Company named him American Master of Design and he was recently honored with the Claude Shannon Luminary Award from Nokia/Bell Labs.
Thursday, May 9: 3:00pm - 4:00pm & Friday, May 10: 9:45am - 10:45am
Hosted by:
Paige Bennett, Design Research Manager, Dropbox
As creatives, we want to produce effective work, but too often, we start projects with a deluge of information that hasn’t been thoughtfully parsed or presented.
The Design Research team at Dropbox was formed to fix this problem, and uncover critical user insights. As designers, traditional research reports fell short as a vehicle to gather buy-in for their work, so the team began looking to other mediums to bring their work to life. Today, their insights are essential in driving company strategy.
In this master class, Dropbox’s Design Research Manager, Paige Bennett, will discuss how any creative — whether or not they have ‘research’ in their title — can wield their own findings to get buy-in from stakeholders and do better, more informed work. Attendees will walk away with new tools, ideas, and approaches to bring to their next big project.
About Dropbox: Dropbox’s mission is to unleash the world’s creative energy by designing a more enlightened way of working. Most “productivity tools” drain creative energy. They constantly ping, distract, and disrupt your team’s flow. And none of them connect, so you spend your days switching between apps, tracking down feedback. It’s busywork, not the meaningful stuff. Dropbox wants to change this, so they’re building a better way to stay in flow and bring your team’s best ideas to life.
Thursday, May 9: 3:00pm - 4:00pm & Friday, May 10: 9:45am - 10:45am
Hosted by:
Saneel Radia, EVP, Chief Innovation Officer, R/GA
Mike Rigby, VP, ECD, R/GA
What happens when you invite creativity and design into the boardrooms of some of the world’s most important organizations?
Join R/GA’s Saneel Radia and Mike Rigby as they unpack how innovation requires not only a focus on designing more compelling brands, but on designing better business models too.
In this master class, you’ll learn how R/GA has helped organizations re-invent themselves by putting creativity first — from designing a radical new digital-first bank to serve the under-banked in Brazil to inventing a new business model for a revolutionary green chemistry company that will reduce our dependence on petrochemicals. You’ll also learn how brand design has evolved in the connected age, and the role of creativity and design in cultivating organizational innovation.
About R/GA: An innovation leader for more than 40 years, R/GA has expanded and evolved to offer business transformation, experience transformation, and marketing transformation to clients through its award-winning consulting, ventures, technology, design, marketing communications, and IP practices. The company has more than 2,000 employees globally, whose work spans web, mobile, and social communications, retail and e-commerce, product innovation, brand development, and innovation consulting.
An innovation leader for more than 40 years, R/GA has expanded and evolved to offer business transformation, experience transformation, and marketing transformation to clients through its award-winning consulting, ventures, technology, design, marketing communications, and IP practices. The firm’s work spans web, mobile, and social communications, retail and e-commerce, product innovation, brand development, and innovation consulting.
Friday, May 10: 9:45am - 10:45am
Hosted by:
Stephanie Yung, Design Director, Smart Design
John Anderson, Technology Director, Smart Design
Inclusive design has flourished over the past decades, helping to bridge the gap between assumptions and realities about designing for diverse groups of people. But it’s not always clear what it means – even as its relevance to the products, services, and experiences around us continue to grow.
In this session, you’ll hear from a studio that pioneered inclusive design and how they’re evolving their approach to meet the challenges of today. Inclusive design goes beyond output and outcomes to describe a way of working. This practice helps each designer continually listen, learn, and adjust their individual lenses and biases to navigate the world around us, and bring the full spectrum of diversity into the design process; whether that’s expressed in ability, language, culture, gender, age, or other human differences.
Stephanie redesigned the fertility experience as a single woman at the center which has been featured by FastCo Design, Good Morning America and highlighted by Fortune’s Broadsheet. John designed a personalized voice assistant for a woman living with progressive MS for BBC Two’s groundbreaking docuseries The Big Life Fix. Drawing on these experiences, Stephanie and John will share the meaningful outcomes created by leveraging inclusive design tools and processes.
About Smart Design: Smart Design is a strategic design company that helps people live better and work smarter. As technology and business become more complex, they use design as a tool to humanize products, services, and experiences through deep research, insights and design strategies. Founded in 1980, Smart has studios in New York and London and clients all over the world.
Friday, May 10: 9:45am - 10:45am
Hosted by: Alain Sylvain, Founder & CEO, Sylvain Labs
If you’ve read a pitch deck, a case study, or trade publication in the past decade, you know that companies of all stripes fetishize ‘innovation.’ We’ve thrown the word around so much that it’s nearly lost all meaning — unfortunate in a time when its true practice has never been more essential. How can we redeem ‘innovation’ and bring dynamic new life to the practice?
In this master class, Alain Sylvain, founder and CEO of Sylvain Labs, will draw from neuroscience, linguistics, history, pop culture, and his experience with clients like Airbnb, Spotify, and BlackRock to argue that by liberating the meaning of innovation, we have the power to unleash a new wave of creativity in business. He’ll also detail a ‘new code of innovation’ that transcends products and services to impact people in new and visceral ways.
About Alain Sylvain: Alain Sylvain is the founder of Sylvain Labs, a strategy and design consultancy that helps companies seize the reality and potential of their business, products, and brands. Their clients include Google, American Express, Airbnb, Spotify, Blackrock, Samsung, Pepsico, AB InBev, Jet, IKEA, GM, Sonos, and the NBA. Alain is also a partner and investor in several ventures, an executive producer on short documentaries, and a board member of Plus Pool and the VCU Brandcenter.
Thursday, May 9: 3:00pm - 4:00pm & Friday, May 10: 9:45am - 10:45am
Hosted by: Christina Amini, Executive Publishing Director, Chronicle Books
Join publishing executive and editor Christina Amini to dive deep into how collaboration works (and when it doesn’t). Over the last 20 years, Amini has worked on more than 500 projects as an editor at Chronicle Books, and has overseen thousands more as the publishing director for art, food, and lifestyle publishing. Amini will share how authentic relationships lead to great results and how our creative work can bring us deeper into our relationships. As she sees it, creativity happens in the context of collaborative relationships. So, in this masterclass, you will learn to build collaborative capital by identifying the key ingredients, fundamental questions, and your own must-have tools for collaborative practice. Because your awesome work, whatever it may be, has the power to make the world bigger and more connected.
About Christina Amini: Christina Amini is the Executive Publishing Director of Art, Food, and Lifestyle Publishing at renowned independent publisher Chronicle Books. She is happy to be a professional collaborator and creator—bringing new ideas to fruition every season, as well as overseeing the publishing of more than 100 books and gift products every year. She has written for Salon.com, Readymade Magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle magazine, and is the author of Before the Mortgage (Simon & Schuster). She is also the steward of artist Susan O’Malley’s work, the Chair of Diversity and Inclusion at her children’s school, and a museum guide at SFMOMA.
Thursday, May 9: 3:00pm - 4:00pm
Hosted by: Jasmine Takanikos, Founder, BrandHuman & Candor Branding
Finding inspiration is a vital part of the creative process, but today, that process can feel like a firehose of information, messages, and images. It’s important as creatives to be open to the world around us, but equally as critical to not let that overload hinder our process or our outputs.
In this master class, Jasmine Takanikos of BrandHuman will break down the process for evaluating what sources to trust for creative inspiration. By identifying the values associated with your identity and the work you want to create, Takanikos will utilize BrandHuman principles to put rigor around what content you take in, acknowledge what personal bias you may be applying, and share how to design a personal lens for learning that will incorporate diverse ways of finding inspiration.
About Jasmine Takanikos: For two decades, Jasmine has worked with both established brands and small businesses to develop brand strategy, integrated marketing, strategic planning, business development, creative direction. She is the founder of Candor Branding, a strategy and design agency.
Jasmine is the creator of the global workshop and lecture series Brand Human, centered around the importance of building lasting relationships with one’s core constituencies through the exploration of the self. She also created and teaches the course ‘Centering Your Brand’ at PARSONS The New School of Design. Her work has earned global recognition from Forbes, Architectural Digest, and NPR.
Thursday, May 9: 3:00pm - 4:00pm
Hosted by:
Brian Quinn, Partner / Instigator, DLW Creative Labs
Shana Dressler, Partner / Activator, DLW Creative Labs
Many companies aspire to put creativity at the center of their practice, but may not yet know how to bring designers into the process and foster effective collaboration.
Process is crucial when multi-disciplinary teams work together: How might designers and creative directors take on leadership positions? How might they work best with their company’s marketing, sales, or operations factions?
In this master class led by DLW Creative Labs, you’ll learn about the ten core human skills that are instrumental to our creative future, based on a wide array of Future of Work reports and thinking. Then, they’ll take a deeper dive into two of these areas to explain specific processes and actions you can implement in your own company and teams.
About DLW Creative Labs: DESIGN/LIFE/WORK is a multi-disciplinary program co-founded by Shana Dressler and Brian Quinn that provides interactive educational workshops and retreats to help companies and creative professionals reskill and upskill their current wheelhouse of capabilities for the 21st Century workforce. Shana Dressler previously led an incubator for design entrepreneurs at Google and produced a four-month on the Future of Work for AIGA/NY. Brian Quinn is an experiential producer who has curated Northside Festival, Social Media Week, CreativeMornings FieldTrips, and a wide range of creative experiences for brands.
