This session explores what happens when design meets politics, including, when evidence, policy, and public opinion collide. Drawing on real government projects, Jane shows how design decisions are never neutral, how to recognise political risks early, and how to stay true to user-centred design in complex environments.

Jane Dolan is a user research and service design consultant with over 30 years’ experience working across UK government, defence and public services. Ethical and empathetic in her approach, she specialises in complex and politically sensitive domains, keeping real human needs at the centre of digital services.

Jane leads The Dolan Method and supports teams to design evidence-based, ethical services grounded in robust research. She is also co-founder of ResearchU Ltd, providing certified trauma-informed research training for practitioners working in high-risk and sensitive environments.

In a world of large language models and computer vision, what happens when we let our bodies interact with historical data? This talk explores an experimental prototype that transforms 20th century Hainanese women's remittance letters into dynamic soundscapes, driven by visitor heartbeats.

For anyone interested in expanding the emotional vocabulary of human-AI interaction through physiological computing, join us for a discussion on how combining biosensors, algorithmic sound synthesis, and historical documents can help us literally feel our way into forgotten stories.

Conceptual and abstract design is great, but sometimes, for users to get their jobs done in the most efficient way, why reinvent the wheel?

In this talk, Ryan explores the roots of common UI patterns, and their physical origins, and how this has helped him in his design journey, being neurodivergent. He then expands this into marketing strategies, product design and a real example of his award winning Service Design of the UK’s first paperless mortgage experience.

We begin by explaining the concept of literalism with real examples like car dashboards, UI components like accordions & carousels, and iconography like floppy disks!

Taking it up a level, Ryan talks about product-level literalism, and how companies/products like Lyft, Google Sheets and FaceTime have embraced it to their advantage for adoption and showcase 2 real case studies:

1. Jones Knowles Ritchie’s work with Dominoes pizza to redesign the product of packaging, using user research to inform the design using literalism.
2. Ryan's own, award-winning, design whilst at NatWest, of the UK’s first paperless mortgage experience.

Finally, we close with some future concepts, on how we can reverse modern technology, to embrace literalism, to bring back nostalgic dopamine from days of old.

Unlock the transformative potential of bringing Ikigai into your work by aligning individual passions and skills with organizational goals to foster a sense of purpose and fulfillment. “Ikigai” is a Japanese concept made of two words 'Iki' meaning alive and 'gai' meaning value or worth, literally meaning – what's the value or worth in being alive!

This concept can be brought to work, wherein we blend passion and purpose together to find fulfilment and boost business value. The four pillars of Ikigai are finding what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for, and form the cornerstone of this transformative approach.

In this session, you will learn how to apply this at work by:

• identifying areas of passion of both customers and employees
• finding the mission of the product and innovation opportunities
• defining goals and influencing at work while collaborating as a team
• create positive results in employee satisfaction, product development and strategy.