Later this week we will announce the first speaker, but first, let us tell you what the From Business to Buttons 2020 conference is all about. Here it is, the Manifesto.
We all love great services and products– experiences that provide meaning, help with difficult tasks, or just give us moments of sheer pleasure. We love to use them… almost as much as we love to create them. Over time, however, our jobs are becoming increasingly complex. The quest for never-ending growth. New technologies. New tools. Internal politics... Supercharge this with ambition, rising expectations, and higher competition, and we have a real challenge. Our organizations are growing, and we need to grow with them. Both professionally, and as human beings.
In our work, we need to at least have some knowledge about everything from business strategy to coding (from business to buttons if you will). Does this mean that each and every one of us need to know everything in detail? Do we all need to become those unicorn people that only exist in the job ads we smirk at? No. But we do have to work smarter – and perhaps most important – work better together.
We need to take it to the top, and learn how to lead our CEOs. We need to optimize how we work in our design teams, through artifacts like design systems, but also by designing the organizations themselves in better ways. We need to go even more agile and learn what great product leadership really means. We need to learn to work with data and algorithms, and with conversation and gestures as interfaces. We really do need to get the fundamentals right, but sometimes we also need to know how to break out of the mold, and create something truly revolutionizing– something no one has ever done before. We’ll cover all this, and more, at the 2020 conference.
But. Is it all about making ourselves better, faster, and stronger? About turning ourselves into productivity machines? Is there nothing more to it? The things we help create are sometimes of limited value to both people and society. Sometimes they’re even harmful... Growing professionally, and as human beings, is also about taking responsibility for the greater issues. There’s an argument to be made that we need to slow down, and be more careful, both to get a better result and to reduce the risk of causing accidental harm. Ethics ought to be mandatory in every design major’s curriculum, as it certainly is at From Business to Buttons.
So, here we are. Increased complexity. Higher competition. Raised expectations. We need to grow, both professionally, and as human beings.
Welcome to From Business to Buttons 2020.
/Johan Berndtsson and the FBTB2020 Team
