What can we expect from design in 2019

Our annual Fjord Trends report is here, born from plenty of Post-it notes, more coffee than we care to mention, lots of healthy debate and quite a few laughs. Trends is always a labour of love, crowdsourced from Fjordians (all 1,000 of us) from around the world – from San Francisco to Berlin, Hong Kong to Johannesburg, Dubai to São Paulo and 22 other places in between.

From their new shinny studio in Farringdon, trendsetters in their own right, Dominic Gregory and Giulio Fagiolini will share their thoughts on trends we can expect to affect business, technology and design in the year ahead.

Dominic is a Service Design Lead who takes multi-disciplined teams on a journey from discovery through to delivery. For clients, this means navigating from ambiguity to useful via uncertainty, collaboration and fortitude.

Doms’ design journey has taken him from developing branded content for global entertainment brands to solving customer and employee challenges for utilities, automotive, retail and financial clients. He believes although agile and data help clients feel safe, designers need to carve a human centred approach to stretching software driven process.

An advocate for neurodiversity Dom believes that every design team needs as strong sense of purpose and community which translate into to design simple and useful experiences. His biggest fears are labelling designers into roles, being overwhelmed with industry centred buzzwords and consultancy PowerPoints.

Giulio is working as a Senior Designer at Fjord London, where his focus has been on designing digital products with a focus on the use of qualitative and quantitative research to inform and validate the design process. He holds a Master’s degree in Communication Design and throughout his career has been focusing on the use of communication design as a means to approach, understand and effectively resolve complex problems. He is passionate about designing products people use every day, improving them by iteration and learning through failure. He loves to craft visual languages and branded experiences, fighting for efficient solutions though proper user experience.

UX: 2019 Frontiers

As a UX designer, you’re constantly bombarded by new technologies, trends and techniques. In your limited time, which ones should you pay attention to? Are Voice UIs really the new frontier? Or should we all start thinking of Mixed Reality apps?

Alexander Baxevanis leads the design team at Webcredible, helping them (among others) evaluate the impact of new technologies on our clients’ businesses. He’s presented and written about Voice UIs and chatbots, and built apps for TVs and smart watches. Before joining Webcredible, he worked for Motorola R&D, working on tech that’s now at the core of every mobile phone.

He’ll help you understand:

• How to evaluate emerging technologies with a critical eye, finding the right balance between optimism and pessimism.
• The types of user research you should be doing to uncover trends and evaluate adoption.
• How prototyping can help you predict the future.