Spend time with some of our favorite thinkers and doers: 99U Breakout Sessions explore new ideas and methodologies around leadership, teamwork, productivity, and more.
Breakout Session selection is now open to registered 99U attendees. Check your inbox for instructions on how to sign up.
Alice Tully Hall Cafe Friday, May 11
Join designer and Adobe Creative Resident Jessica Bellamy to learn how to tell visual data stories that inspire policy change and mobilize information at the grassroots level. In this hands on-workshop, you’ll explore and apply principles of conscious and responsible design to a real-world infographic project.
Participants will leave with an actionable list of design strategies, and with experience creating an infographic for the nonprofit organization Urban Arts Partnership.
About Jessica Bellamy: Adobe Creative Resident and designer Jessica Bellamy tells visual and personalized stories using data. In her work driving social change through design, she partners with nonprofits and community groups to create compelling materials that break down complex customer, service, and policy information.
About Urban Arts Partnership: For over 25 years, UAP has improved academic outcomes, graduation rates, artistic growth, social-emotional learning, and community engagement through their arts-integrated approach to education in and beyond the classroom.
Samuels Teaching Studio, Rose Building Friday, May 11
Hosted by:
Jon Burgerman, artist & illustrator
Forget the idea of ‘failure’ or ‘not being good enough’ and revitalise your creativity at Doodle School! In this session, artist Jon Burgerman will present creative prompts and fun activities based on his multifaceted practice for everyone to enjoy—you’ll learn how to make something out of nothing, and to enjoy not having full control over what you’re doing.
Jon Burgerman’s Doodle School is perfect for anyone in need of a creative jumpstart. Or anyone wanting 90 minutes of fun and a graduation certificate.
Enroll now in Doodle School (extra credit given to anyone bringing teacher a snack).
Pick this session if you’re interested in: Illustration, Creative Thinking
About Jon Burgerman: Jon is an artist known for his colorful and comical works. His artworks are held in the collections of several institutions including the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery. Jon has collaborated with brands including Snapchat, Nike, Samsung, Apple, Sesame Street, and Disney, and received commissions from organizations like the Sheffield Children’s Hospital and DIFFA (Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS).
Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse, Rose Building Friday, May 11
Hosted by:
Jason Cha, Director, Training & Culture Strategy, The Design Gym
How often do you find yourself in a brainstorm, coming up with the same old ideas? Whether you’re trying to design a better product or improve your customer service experience, when generating innovative ideas it’s helpful to have some creative tools that spark fresh thinking.
In this session, led by The Design Gym’s Jason Cha in partnership with non-profit organization Girls Who Code, you’ll use what you learn to create new ideas on how to engage GWC’s constituency through creativity, bravery, and teamwork—and you’ll leave with a set of tools you can bring back to your own work, to use whenever you feel stuck.
Pick this session if you’re interested in: Creative Thinking, Design for Good, Productivity
About The Design Gym: The Design Gym empowers organizations to build cultures of greater creativity and collaboration using the language of design thinking. Unlike traditional innovation agencies, they don’t ever do the work for clients, but rather bring the tools, facilitation, training, and learning environments to build that muscle memory in-house.
About Girls Who Code: Girls Who Code is a national non-profit organization working to close the gender gap in technology and change the image of what a programmer looks like and does. With their seven-week Summer Immersion Program, two-week specialized Campus Program, after school Clubs, and a 13-book New York Times best-selling series, they are leading the movement to inspire, educate, and equip young women with the computing skills to pursue 21st century opportunities. By the end of the 2018 academic year, Girls Who Code will have reached over 50 thousand girls in all 50 states and several US territories.
Metropolitan Opera Learning Center Friday, May 11
Hosted by:
Annica Lydenberg, founder, Dirty Bandits
This highly interactive workshop hosted by hand lettering superstar Annica Lydenberg will inspire participants familiar with design and typography to broaden their stylistic capabilities.
This session is a great skill-sharpener for both experienced designers and novices interested in the rise of hand lettering, and how typography informs the visual communication of brands.
Class will begin with an overview of what makes hand lettering special and examples of a wide range of styles and inspiration, before you’ll roll up your sleeves to practice hand lettering yourself. Participants will be trying a wide variety of styles that might not be their usual go-tos and experiment with different types of embellishments to dress up their lettering, resulting in a final piece you can take home as a souvenir.
About Annica Lydenberg:Annica is a Brooklyn-based lettering artist, mural painter, and creative director with a deep passion for typography. She studied typeface design at Type@Cooper program and sign painting at New Bohemia Signs. She works with pencil, pen, chalk, brush, and the computer, pulling stylistic influence from an ever-growing library of found type and vintage and contemporary signage. Her work is inspired by an obsession with puns, a belief in social good, and a love of 90s hip hop.
Board Room, David H. Koch Theater Friday, May 11
Hosted by:
Nathan Goldman, Founder/Principal Designer, DKNG Studios
Dan Kuhlken, Founder/Principal Illustrator, DKNG Studios
This workshop by creative studio DKNG will cover the essential steps founders Dan Kuhlken and Nathan Goldman take with every new project—from concept development, team brainstorming, providing constructive criticism and feedback, art direction, composition, adding layers of meaning, to final execution—all of which they approach as a collaborative process.
Workshop participants will team up in pairs to follow a design brief using the concept of play and construction as a gateway to explore DKNG’s collaborative creative process. Taking each other’s strengths and weaknesses into consideration, each pair will learn to work as a team, leaning on each other’s unique skillsets to build a collaborative project.
Pick this session if you’re interested in: Creative Teams, Productivity, Client Work, Graphic Design
About DKNG: DKNG is a full-service graphic design and illustration studio catering primarily to the entertainment industry.
David Rubenstein Atrium Friday, May 11
Hosted by: Jens Riegelsberger, UX Director, Google
A few years ago, a small band of UX designers and researchers at Google highlighted how seemingly minor design and usability snags can build up to break entire user journeys. With that, the ‘Product Excellence’ team was born—a cross-functional group with the mission to keep the company culture focused on product and design quality.
In this session, Google’s UX director Jens Riegelsberger will share how the Product Excellence team influences Google’s company culture. You’ll learn how organizational challenges can create pitfalls for product quality, the steps you can take to influence cultural change in your organization, and how to apply Google’s principles for excellence to assess quality in your own products.
Pick this session if you’re interested in: Leadership, Creative Teams, UX Design
About Google Product Excellence: Google has seven products that reach more than one billion users in countries all over the world. With this reach comes a pretty unique degree of complexity across user needs, technical infrastructure, markets, and platforms. How does Google, a company with more than 40,000 product developers, strive to consistently deliver excellent product experiences to users? In 2014, a grassroots effort started by volunteers in the UX team gained momentum and evolved into a company-wide cross-functional initiative to raise the quality bar for product development by focusing on the user.
The Product Excellence team is a small, cross-functional group with with many members coming from a UX background. They partner with all parts of the business (including product management, engineering, marketing, human resources, staffing, communications) to help evolve Google’s culture, systems, and processes to build and ship high-quality products that users trust and love.
Starr Theater at Alice Tully Hall Friday, May 11
Hosted by:
Aundre Larrow, Adobe Creative Resident
Have you ever considered how powerful the camera in your pocket is? Think about it: almost every great photo in history was taken on a camera worse than yours.
In this session, photographer and Adobe Creative Resident Aundre Larrow will teach you how to take advantage of your smartphone camera. Geared towards anyone thinking about the visual language of products and organizations, this workshop will boost your skills as a photographer, your ability to identify great photography, and how to clearly communicate your visual needs.
Pick this session if you’re interested in: Photography, Branding
About Aundre Larrow: Aundre is a Brooklyn-based portrait photographer specializing in editorial and lifestyle work. He has shot the NCAA Tournament, New York Fashion Week, and a portrait project about immigration. Throughout the years, his work has always pursued the truth that can be found in portraiture, and his current work as an Adobe Creative Resident is the next chapter of that.
Clark Studio Theater, Rose Building Friday, May 11
Hosted by:
Jennet Liaw, artist
Kervin Brisseaux, design director, Vault49
For most of us, inspiration doesn’t always strike when we’re at our desks. With mobile devices as a constant in our every life experience, the ability to use them to ideate and even complete a final product, without relying on our desktop computers, is the greatest opportunity of the present.
In this session, designers and illustrators Jennet Liaw and Kervin Brisseaux will share their mobile creation journeys and show you how to use Adobe apps and the devices in your pocket to create serious work. You’ll also have the chance to play with the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil to expand your creative toolkit and add hand-drawn appeal to any digital project.
Pick this session if you’re interested in: Illustration, Typography, Creative Thinking
About Jennet Liaw: Former Nike designer Jennet Liaw now works independently out of Brooklyn, focusing on illustrative type, mural painting, and product graphic design. Her large-scale letters and brand campaign work have generated a clientele that includes Adidas, 20th Century FOX, REI, Incase, Sony Pictures, Adobe Systems, Uber, Clifbar, and Apple.
About Kervin Brisseaux: Kervin is an associate design director at Vault49 and a freelance artist, who has worked with brands like Adobe, PepsiCo, Gatorade, and Nike. His illustration style experiments with a fusion of photographic takeovers, street fashion, and Japanese manga. As a New York native, Kervin is a huge pop culture enthusiast, gathering inspiration from various creative avenues including, but not limited to, music, fashion, and a good sci-fi or anime flick.
Daniel & Joanna S. Rose Studio, Rose Building Friday, May 11
Hosted by:
Kristen Lueck, Director of Strategy, Man Made Music
Dan Venne, SVP Group Creative Director + Lead Producer, Man Made Music
What if your toaster whined like a child when your toast was burning? Or if your chair grumbled like an old man when you’ve been sitting too long? Of all the existing sensory modalities, sound is the most-overlooked opportunity to uncovering the next design breakthrough. As humans, we’re wired for it – reacting to sound faster than any other sense. But because we process sound subconsciously, it can be challenging to understand when to use sound and why.
In this session, led by music and sound strategists Man Made Music, you’ll explore how the simplest of objects can become personified and communicative through the use of strategic sound design. Flex your underutilized sonic design muscles by exploring the role of sound as a tool for clear and differentiated communication. Attendees will then practice by building their own products with a Sonic-focused lens. The result: your own set of fantastical products and an approach for creating more emotional, intuitive and compelling experiences.
Pick this session if you’re interested in: Sound Design, Future-Proofing, Prototyping
About Man Made Music: Man Made Music is the music and sound studio for global brands, technology companies, and entertainment groups including Nissan, Citi, AT&T, and Deloitte. Their work has been heard on television in the themes and music for networks and programs including Entertainment Tonight, HBO, CBS This Morning, the NFL Super Bowl, ESPN’s 30 for 30, and FX Has the Movies. Man Made Music has also pioneered a musical approach to sound design for products and brands in a connected world.
Man Made Music founder Joel Beckerman is a known thought leader in the world of sound and business, as author of The Sonic Boom: How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel and Buy and was named one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People. The Man Made Music team has been featured on stage at conferences including SXSW, London Design Week, C2 Montreal, Fast Company Innovation Festival, and Future of Storytelling, as well as in major media including the Wall Street Journal, Wired, AdWeek, Forbes, and Harvard Business Review.
Their current innovation work and thinking lives at the intersection of sound and smart devices, for products including autonomous cars, health environments, and smart homes.
Howard Gilman Theater, Film Society at Lincoln Center Friday, May 11
Hosted by:
Bree Groff, CEO, NOBL
Change is industry-agnostic. Change doesn’t care how large or small your organization is. It’s coming for all of us.
Brands and agencies are awash in a sea of changes, with most feeling that they need to run just to keep up. This increasing pace of change demands a new breed of change management.
In this session, NOBL will share how leaders (or change agents at any level of an organization) can shepherd their teams through transformation. Attendees will learn how to identify resistance in its many forms, diagnose the six types of loss employees anticipate during change, and design a plan for driving authentic, effective change in their own organizations.
Pick this session if you’re interested in: Leadership, Creative Thinking, Future-Proofing, Creative Teams
About NOBL: NOBL (pronounced no-bell) was founded in 2014 to help leaders make change. Today, they are a global change agency, training organizations to embrace new attitudes and adopt new behaviors. NOBL’s work is most meaningful when their partners grow to their full potential, when they are freed to truly serve their customers and clients, and when their impact on the world becomes powerful and profound.
Francesca Beale Theater, Film Society at Lincoln Center Friday, May 11
Hosted by:
Mike Rigby, VP, ECD of Business Transformation, R/GA
Jennifer Vano, Head of Verbal Design, R/GA
Award-winning, full-service agency R/GA is known for their creation of ‘Connected Brands’ for Fortune 500 companies including Nike, Samsung, and Google.
In this session, Mike Rigby, VP, ECD of business transformation, and Jennifer Vano, head of verbal design, will share R/GA’s unique approach to connected brands. Attendees will team up to develop a new product’s purpose, brand name, signifier, and key feature — gaining perspective on how experience, visual, and verbal design connect to each other, and to a brand’s purpose.
Pick this session if you’re interested in: Branding, Marketing, Future-Proofing
About R/GA: R/GA is connected by design. An innovation leader for more than 40 years, R/GA has expanded to offer consulting, ventures, technology, marketing communications, architecture, and IP development services in addition to its award-winning design practice. R/GA’s work spans web, mobile and social communications, retail and e-commerce, product innovation, brand development, and business transformation.
The company has more than 2,000 employees globally with 19 offices across the United States, Europe, South America, and Asia-Pacific. R/GA is part of The Interpublic Group of Companies, one of the world’s largest advertising and marketing services organizations.
