Opening talk by Ingrid Haug & Helle Martens

All right, good morning everybody and welcome to Design Matters. My name is Ingrid. I'm one of the arrangers, the organizers of this conference and I'm super, super happy to be here and I'm very excited to meet all of you, all the speakers, all the audience and spend two days with you here at Talbouden. So, why are we here? Well, of course, we think that design matters. It really, really, really matters a lot. It matters in everything we surround ourselves with in our daily lives. It matters in the little things that provide us with function and not the least, it matters in the devices and screens we look at a million times a day. We wouldn't look at them if they weren't well-designed. So, how does great design happen? Well, often it evolves a little bit like this, like the refrigerator example here. Step by step. Each new version a little bit better than the previous one. Better aesthetics, better technology, perhaps a better price. One improvement at the time. And for each improvement, a bit more value is created for the user. The customer. The users start using the products in slightly new ways. They get a little bit more empowered. They feel that they get a little bit more comfort. Suddenly there's a cup holder. But fundamentally, the product is the same and the market evolves gradually, step by step, without really changing radically. And this step by step innovation or design is usually off the top. The product is usually often referred to as sustaining innovation. You probably all know that. But then, sometimes products change our ways radically. They disrupt our usual ways of thinking, of acting, of socializing, of behaving. And that's called disruptive innovation. Pow. And what you all know, because otherwise you probably wouldn't be here, but I'll tell you anyways, is that disruptive innovation, it changes the market that it gets to. Or it creates an entirely new market. It changes industries. It changes sectors. It puts people out of work. It destroys companies and it creates new ones. We often see that entirely new players emerge in the field that was long occupied by old companies and corporations. To give you kind of a fun, old example, I'd like to talk about this picture. It's taken around year 900 in a town called Hudson, two hours north of New York City. It's by the river, the Hudson River, that also flows through New York City. Around the year 1900, there was a large and thriving ice industry in Hudson. Workers in the wintertime would go to the river and ice fields and they would pick up blocks of ice. And they would store it in ice houses, just like you see there along the river. So in the spring and in the summer, they would ship down those ice blocks to New York City for the ladies to use in their, I don't know, their drinks or their food closets. And they would bring it on boats. So it would just kind of get ice from upstream down to New York City all through the summer. But then, of course, as things had to be, in the 1920s, the refrigerators started to come. And suddenly, they limited the need for ice from Hudson. So refrigerators disrupted and killed the ice industry in Hudson. That was in the old days. This is also in a bit of the old days. But then, when in 1992, the World Wide Web came, that disrupted, I'd say, practically every market for sharing and reaching information. It also disrupted our ways of shopping. Of dating. I mean, the list is endless. And then in 2007, when the first user-friendly smartphone came, I'd say, that made the internet mobile. And these things have changed so many ways, our ways of behaving and acting. It's changed so many markets. And then, finally, I have the feeling that in the digital world, disruption happens more than ever. So what about disruption and design? Is design the key factor in disruption? Of course, price and technology are essential. But so is design. Because if design wasn't there, would the disruption really happen? I'm not really sure. But we all know that users want to change their behavior if they get a user-friendly, attractive, pleasurable product. And that's all due to design. A great example is this one. The Nest thermostat. I've never used it, but I've heard so much about it. It's supposed to make people use a thermostat in very complex ways that they never have before. People that have never had a behavioral pattern related to thermostats suddenly start using it. It's related to things that suddenly start doing things they haven't done before. That disrupted that market. Or it will maybe. Because it's not that outspread in Denmark yet. The Fitbit wristband. That created an entirely new market. It's not that people weren't tracking their steps and the activity before. But it was very, very limited. Suddenly it became a mass market. So that disrupted that whole industry in just creating something new that wasn't there before. People would track their activity, track their steps. And that was just only for the very few before that. And who knows if we in the coming years or even months would see industries getting disrupted by this little fella, the Apple Watch. It just might. This conference brings together some smart and talented people that all contribute to changing the way we act. And behave. And think. By creating great product. Common for them is that they do something that actually disrupts our ways in some way or the other. And they do that in the way of designing something so well done that we actually would want to use it. And without that really great design that they're creating, I'm not really sure that disruption would happen as it did. Or as it is. We call them game changers. Game changers. And you know the industries that are being changed and being disrupted as we speak. Or the last couple of years. They're probably also well known to you. And that's probably also why you're here today. But let me just bring up a few examples anyways. We don't really stay in hotels anymore. At least not when we go to New York. Because we go with Airbnb. Right Chris? And of course we don't do any international phone calls anymore. Because you're stupid if you don't do Skype instead. In Denmark, we don't call a taxi anymore. Actually we still go with taxis because Uber is not here. But we don't call a taxi anymore. We don't sit in line and all these things. Because we just use a little nice app called Driver. And do you remember standing in a line in a bank to transfer money to people? It might be a bit a while ago. But everybody in Denmark uses mobile pay now. And these guys. Remember them? The marketing team. Sorry about the photo. I think they look like a marketing team. Totally. We don't need them anymore. Because it's so easy to use MailChimp for your next mail campaign. That we can just do without them. And last but not least. We don't have to guess anymore. And we're not to. Because women just use Clue. And that's just a few of the game changers we're going to meet for the next two days. They're going to talk about their products and how they're designed. And make the choices that create great experiences. They'll talk about how they change people's behavior. One design decision at the time. And I'm really looking forward to hearing everybody and listening to all the great speaks. And to make sure that that goes exactly as planned. I'd like to introduce our conference chair for this conference. Her name is Helle Martens. She's a UX designer. She's worked in the industry in Denmark for many years. She was a part of Nokia when Nokia was ruling the mobile phone industry in the world. And for the last four months. She's been working her ass off organizing this event. So please give her a very warm welcome. Very warm welcome, Helle Martens. Thank you. Is this working? Yes. This is yours. It's Chris's. Sorry. Thank you so much, everybody. It's not just me. It's still here. Ingrid and Michael had a big part of this, too. And we've had a blast doing this. I'm so amazed at all the people here. Even, I mean, the list of speakers is amazing. We've got just incredible speakers. Incredible that everybody here came here today. We really appreciate everything. Thank you. And thank you to our sponsors. We have One.com, who not only flew in Skype, Ross Smith from Skype. They've also given you all a year free hosting, if you can use that. It's in your notebook. There's a green notebook with a little sticker on it. Thank you to Pentia and Operate and Think Digital for hosting workshops. We're doing those tomorrow. And thanks to 23, this entire session, we're going to be hosting a conference. The whole conference is being recorded. And since we are already recording, we have a surprise for you. We're actually streaming live. Hi, Mom. So share this link with your colleagues, if you would like. Now I'm two slides behind. And this has also just been sent to your emails, if you'd like. Thank you to Exure and Balsamic and Lomax, who've all provided merchandise and sponsorships. And thank you to Proto.io, who have generously given each of us a 60-day trial. And they've actually also given us two free one-year subscriptions. And we'll be competing about those. We're having a little competition. So if you hashtag your photos on Instagram, we'll have two winners, one today and one tomorrow, for the best Instagram picture we have of Jury. So if you're interested in a Proto.io one-year subscription, please go ahead and tag your photos. Practical information. This is our hashtag. There's a wardrobe where you can get your photos. I'm sure you've all seen it. It's only us on the premises, so there's nothing to worry about, even though it's not guarded. Toilets are either up here on your right or out by the wardrobe. The weather is fantastic today. Thank goodness. So we're having lunch outside in this area. But this area is only going to be opened up for lunch. And if we're going outside otherwise, we need to use this area out here. Also, if you've signed up for our speaker's dinner tonight, we have a little clip on your tag. If you're missing that, please talk to Michael, the young fellow over here, and he'll help you. And if you haven't signed up yet, we still have a few tickets left, and that's also Michael you need to talk to. Now, I'd also like to introduce you to our other helpers. We've got Michael, Ingrid, and myself. If you need help, please talk to either Vicky, she's over here behind you. Hi, Vicky. And we have another Mia who's coming later. And we've also got Katerina. I'm sure you noticed her at the entry. She had long blonde hair. Beautiful lady. I don't know where she is. But anyway, any of these people will help you with anything you need. We've also set up a lounge area in case any of you need to break out and work. There are electrical outlets out here, places to sit either out by the wardrobe, this little area by the bar, or in the back room. You can also break out if you need to. So now I'd like you all to find a person in your vicinity that you don't know and just introduce yourself and spend two minutes, five words or so, explaining to them why you're here. Please go ahead. I need to do an introduction of you first, though. Okay. Okay. Woo. Hello. Nice to meet you. Nice. Do you have another second? You are not working. MICHAEL inspired that. Okay. Was that about two minutes? Sounded like a lot more than five words. I'm going to need to ask everybody. Your minutes are up. Okay. Excellent. Thank you. I'm going to ask everybody to please remember what you just said and then fill that out in our survey after the conference, please. We'll be sending the link out tomorrow. And we'll also be sending a link to all of the recordings that we have today. So the program today, we have Airbnb, Plan Day, and Volvo before lunch. And we're having a wonderful lunch outside. After lunch, we're running a fast-paced one-hour session with three new startups, followed by mobile pay and then afternoon coffee and cake. Our afternoon is going to be really intense. We've got Driver, BBC 23, and Spotify. And after each, we're going to have a short Q&A.