Mindset of Design 2022
Coming back in 2023
Are you ready to explore the unobvious?
Mindset of Design is a celebration of human-centred design; a place for creative thinkers to come together to connect, create and get curious.
Immerse yourself to celebrate creative thinking with globally-renowned speakers and interactive experiences.
Get the full Mindset of Design experience with a festival pass or explore your way with our other pass options.
5 days
4 Masterclasses
20+ speakers
Speakers

Audrea Topps Harjo
A44 Games

Ben Johnston
Josephmark

Carolyn Pearce
Creatable

Chris Clay
We Create Futures

Troy Innocent
RMIT University

Chris Jackson
We Create Futures


Chris Meade
Launchsight

Grant Verhoeven
Leadership and career consultant

Jade tang-Taylor
Innovation Unit

Kadri Uljas
Vivita

Katie Martin
The Sensonauts

Katy Grennier
Designing for Systems Innovation and Leadership (DSIL Global)

Madeleine Taylor
People Skills Consulting

Matt Ellingsen
Kāpuhipuhi Wellington Uni Professional

Dr Mark Bradford
BeWeDō®

Natasha Zimmerman
Unchatter

Nick Brown-Haysom
Psychotherapist

Raul Sarrot
Freshfish

Vashti Whitfield
The School of Life

Sam Ramlu
Method and M Theory

Stephen Cummings
The Atom Innovation Space

Tom Brotherstone
Awhi Yoga
Festival location: Te Auaha
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8:00 AM
Breakfast Beats
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9:00 AM / Keynote
Chris Jackson and Chris Clay, We Create Futures
Envisioning Transformational Futures
While the future can only exist in our imagination, we are constantly fed a narrow range of future visions that attempt to predict the unpredictable and ultimately favour the few over the many.
In this talk, We Create Futures will share how they infuse techniques from strategic foresight with creativity to help people envision diverse, imaginative futures grounded in present-day reality.
You will leave with a range of valuable framings for different possible futures alongside some new perspectives about the present. Not only will this make you more interesting at dinner parties, but it will also help you separate the noise from what could be transformational.
See you in the futures.
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10:45 AM / Virtual keynote
Sam Ramlu, Method and M Theory
Expanding the Mindset of Design through diversity and Inclusion
Join Sam Ramlu as she shares how her company, Method, design and develop their creative projects.
Sam will explain how the output and outcomes of Method's design thinking process changes when there is diverse thinking from eclectic backgrounds, and also show examples of their work that demonstrate their unique approach!
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1:00 PM / Masterclass
Chris Jackson and Chris Clay, We Create Futures
Creating Transformational Futures
This workshop will align closely with We Create Futures' keynote and will involve tools and methods developed by various international luminaries and some of their home-grown magic.
Participants will use these tools to create transformational futures by challenging the constraints of the present. The session will be relevant for participants across all sectors and industries and draw on the diverse experiences, hopes and dreams present in the room.
1:00 PM / Keynote
Madeleine Taylor, People Skills Consulting
Clarity in conflict: noticing the dynamic, shifting and restoring connection
What to expect:
An interactive session that will expand your recognition of conflict and how to work with it, and ask the questions:
- What is the point of conflict?
- Setting up for success
- What if it isn’t? – Is it them or me?
- What if it is me?
- Now what?
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2:30 PM / Keynote
Nick Brown-Haysom, Psychotherapist
Ku’i lou faku (Punch your Heart)
A young Pacifica client recently told Nick of a traditional saying his wise and kind uncle repeats to him, “You must punch your heart.” What he meant is that we need to stick with all of the feelings that enter our heart until we can understand what it is trying to tell us, we need to wake our heart up to do this. Nick's talk will challenge the audience to “punch their hearts” to see what creatively this can conjure.
Nick works daily with depressed young people; smart, gifted, talented, sensitive, well-meaning people, and has come to strongly believe that their depression might in fact be a protest. They cannot tolerate the conditions of modern life and yet we deem them “sick” and compel them to change. What if they are the on-to-it ones and we are all “mental” (intentionally a non-diagnostic term) in putting up with what we do. Using the personal experience of operating in two very different worlds, clinical vignettes and original analysis, Nick will examine how creativity is both a victim of, and an antidote to, what can be a depressing world.
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3:45 PM / Converstation Cafe - an inclusive way of doing panels
With guests: Katy Grennier (DSIL Global) Joel Lieser, Nick Brown-Haysom and Madeleine Taylor.
Topic:
People who live on islands make the worst designers, change my mind.
Festival location: Datacom
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8:00 AM
Breakfast Beats
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9:00 AM / Keynote
Audrea Topps Harjo, A44 Games
Harnessing the Power of Intent
How do we bring vision forth? Breathe life into it? Take it from a small kernel of an idea and transform it into something that you can see and touch? That is the secret, isn’t it?
Over Audrea's almost thirty-year career in the entertainment industry, she has found the key: creative visualisation and the power of intent. Audrea has been able to succinctly harness that power to create, inspire and lead. She will discuss finding and locking onto your passion, seeing, claiming and manifesting your unique vision.
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10:45 AM / Virtual keynote
Vashti Whitfield, The School of Life
Blindspots, curveballs and the truth about the creative mind
Join Vashti as she weaves her way through the perils and the potential of the creative mind.
Learn how to unlock and unblock performance and potential and how to use legacy as a driving force for overcoming adversity.
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1:00 PM / Keynote
Dr Mark Bradford, BeWeDō®
Human-centred design as a motion-led relational process
BeWeDō® moves conversation to action for collective creativity, leadership development and decision-making. In this keynote, Dr Mark Bradford will explain how the unique approach literally creates space to get people moving with others – physically, mentally and socially to break down barriers and creative blocks which we experience every day.
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2:30 PM / Keynote
Jade Tang-Taylor, Innovation Unit
Designing for social and systems change
Change is occurring at an ever-evolving rate, especially in our modern society. Increasingly, designers are reflecting on how they might use their skills, talents, expertise and experience to contribute to a better world.
Now more than ever, there is a strong desire to transition from using design and innovation purely in commercial contexts to a better alternative; designing for social innovation, social change and systems change.
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3:45 PM / Workshop
Katy Grennier, DSIL Global
Mind Swarm: Social Technologies – mad hatter
For a long time, the world has been using the same structures in the way we gather: presentations, panels, one speaker at a time. Imagine the wisdom, riffs and ideas that leaves unhatched in a room!
Social technologies are emerging and being designed every day to invite large groups of people like us to come together to make sense of what we are learning from one another while offering new ways to interact. These simple structures work to spread that power and build equity inviting everyone in the room – all at once.
Sounds hectic? It's not! It's vibrant, fun!
Whether you're attending the conference for a day or the whole week, come and sense-make your insights; reflect and amplify ideas with the other humans and in a human way.
Learn a tool or two to take back to your workspace, experience non-awkward ways to meet new people in more meaningful ways than networking, and integrate your learnings in a way that lets the ideas and inspiration that comes from our MOD speakers integrate and be put into practice into your life far beyond when the event ends… for 2022 anyway. Presented by DSIL Global and with riffs on these social technologies in 30 countries, you are bound to see your design mind find what will work for you!
Festival location: Datacom
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8:00 AM / The Sustainable Breakfast Bar with The Oatery
Entrepreneurs designing for tomorrow with Reusabowl, FTN Motion, Hitch and Foodprint, hosted by Ben Hamm-Conard.
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9:00 AM / Keynote
Chris Meade, Launchsight
Recognising little things that lead to big change
For businesses wanting to reach new customers, the threads of a key insight can often be hiding in plain sight, even to the trained researcher's eye.
In this case study-loaded presentation, Chris will talk about how using all three components of design research – immersion, observation and engagement – uncovered little threads that formed key insights underpinning the creation of new brands and customer experiences.
From local service experiences to major export consumer brands, he will also cover some practical ways for connecting with customers, remotely and directly, to quickly advance thinking and, ultimately, give leaders the confidence to invest in new ventures.
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10:45 AM / Virtual Keynote
Ben Johnston, Josephmark
Meta Futures
Ben Johnston CEO of Josephmark Venture Group – a collective of venture studios that originate, build and capitalise purposeful businesses – will be talking about designing regenerative ventures for a better tomorrow.
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1:00 PM / Masterclass
Katy Grennier, DSIL Global
Global Design Leadership: provocative mindset must-haves for real shot at systems change
This workshop has been delivered in over 20 countries with high-level design leaders from IDEO to IBM who are brave enough to look at the intersection of design and leadership or simply put- being human.
You won't be sitting and listening but rather digging your hands into the experiences of your own to unlock what you need to shift in your leadership, in manageable ways so that your design way, design team, and design projects can not only find solutions that go beyond sustainable to also change the way you are as a designer – starting tomorrow.
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2:30 PM / Virtual Keynote
Carolyn Pearce, Creatable
Designing Culture for impact
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” – James Clear, Atomic Habits
If that’s true, we need those systems and habits to be designed. That’s culture. Carolyn will explore based on her own experience and learnings from leading global companies, the power of systems, habits, and attitudes to unleash the potential of teams to have the greatest impact.
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3:45 PM / Keynote
Matt Ellingsen, Kāpuhipuhi Wellington Uni Professional
Your customers are lying to you!
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6:00 PM / Connect
Quiz @ Te Auaha
Festival location: Te Auaha
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8:00 AM
Breakfast Beats
8:00 AM / *Add-on*
Tom Brotherstone, Awhi Yoga
Designing your peace of mind
Morning yoga and breathing techniques.
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9:00 AM / Keynote
Katy Grennier, DSIL Global
From leadership to gardenship: How we design messy gardens of people that lead to unimaginable solutions
This inspiring keynote will invite Katy into the bravery she asks of the world. It will touch on the messiness that most systems, communities, and individuals in the world choose to ignore most of the time: trauma, celebration, silence, grief, non-linearity, and the other things you can feel in the very spaces you work in that are brushed by when leaders choose.
If WE are ignoring our humanness on a collective level – what are we building in the world of design?
The keynote will weave together powerful storytelling to illuminate just how critical all those humanness we ignore is to creating unimaginable futures seen take shape in countries around the world with things as simple as trash.
Katy will also show us through visual the systemic truth about why we were taught to ‘ignore’ and why it’s so damn hard to break those cycles; bringing you into the private conversations she wants to have in public with global leaders every day about her own complex trauma journey and the thousands she has listened to not heard loud enough. Now, is the time for design thinking to be composted so a new one can emerge built on resilience, trust and emergent strategies that no leader can do in isolation anymore. We all need to Gardenship.
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10:45 AM / Masterclass
Katy Grennier, DSIL Global
Trauma and inclusive design tools: how we are doing
This workshop is for the courageous and caring who are ready to tend to a world that can heal while designing, together.
Come with your sleeves rolled up, Katy will teach by using the latest in learning sciences and take you through a series of exercises and tools DSIL Global has built throughout the years alongside communities and some of the best designers in the world with diverse humans who don’t agree and complex challenges at the centre.
You will learn how to and if you can create authentic conditions for safety and allow more honesty from the start. This workshop will also encourage you to see yourself more in resilient ways that will unlock possible new design principles to bring to your work, teams, and company.
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1:00 PM / Keynote
Katie Martin, The Sensonauts
Phoenix Design: Courage and creativity
How do you approach design when life implodes around you? What's the place of fear, and courage, in design?
Katie will explore designing like a phoenix, collaboration, conflict and creativity. We'll look at emotions and pleasure in designing experiences, and using the tough stuff that's happened to shape how you design.
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2:30 PM / Keynote
Stephen Cummings, The Atom Innovation Space
Design thinking and strategy
When we think about promoting creativity we tend to either think that there must be a "one-best" approach to the creative process, or that every creative person is an idiosyncratic genius whose method cannot be replicated. Chris Bilton, Stephen Cummings and dt Ogilvie's research suggest that neither approach is helpful.
In this talk, Stephen Cummings introduces the Creativities Canvas as an alternative way of thinking in a purposeful design-led way about creativity: a simple framework for thinking about what kind of creative, design-led individual or organization you want to be. He illustrates the Canvas with reference to one of the best pieces of design to have come out of Aotearoa New Zealand in the last decade, and one that you’ve probably never heard of.
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3:45 PM / Panel
Chris Jackson, We Create Futures
Talking Transformational Futures, with guests Audrea Topps Harjo, Chris Meade and Mark Bradford.
From the climate crisis to novel coronaviruses, many of us are left with no doubt that the human race needs to radically transform how we engage with the world. Yet, it seems like we cannot create compelling future visions to enact change as a species.
So how do we go about transformation? What does it mean to people? How are they going on their transformational journeys?
These are some of the questions we’ll dive into when We Create Futures holds a panel discussion based on the content of their previous talk and workshop, tying up their conference thread of Transformational Futures.
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5:30 PM / *Add-on*
Natasha Zimmerman, Unchatter
These sessions have a limited capacity and will be first in-first served. These exclusive additional sessions can be purchased as an 'add-on' to your ticket.
This is not your average party! You'll be entering a space where small talk is banned and deep conversations are the norm. If you’re keen to be a little kinder to yourself, create dynamite friendships, and communicate more courageously than ever before, this is the space to do it. We bring the questions, you bring the curiosity.
Something we believe deeply at Unchatter is that meaningful connection shouldn’t be a one-off event; it’s a living, breathing practice to take to the kitchen table, the office, and even the supermarket check-out line.
This is a thoughtfully crafted experience for introverts and extroverts alike.
If you're a human and want to feel like you matter, this is the place for you.
Festival location: Te Auaha
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8:00 AM / *Add-on*
Breakfast rave: Shakes with mates, with Shut up and Dance
These sessions have a limited capacity and will be first in-first served. These exclusive additional sessions can be purchased as an 'add-on' to your ticket.
Book now
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9:00 AM / Keynote
Kadri Uljas, VIVITA Aotearoa
How to ignite your inner creative genius
Fuelled by imagination, creativity has driven human achievement since the conception of humanity. It is also the cornerstone of innovation, bringing us flying machines and connecting us across the globe. Yet, creativity is considered something almost magical – a superpower that only unicorns possess. Or more precisely, a mere 2% of us.
What if we were all born creative geniuses, we just forgot how to be creative? What if working alongside and not above kids could unlock a dormant, yet, inherent quality in us?
Join the talk to discover the current state of affairs we have with creativity and learn how you can ignite creativity and innovation through co-creating with the youngest members of our society.
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10:45 AM / Virtual Keynote
Troy Innocent, RMIT University
Urban Playgrounds: let's play with public space again
Playful approaches to urbanism enhance social wellbeing and community engagement – creating experiences that renew, reimagine, and reconnect us with our cities. Combining urban exploration and augmented reality, 64 Ways of Being transforms post-lockdown Melbourne into a playable city inviting players to rediscover its creative, linguistic, cultural, social and urban diversity.
This session translates and blends knowledge from landscape architecture and game design, public art and creative technologies to deliver key learnings: the impact of playful urbanism on social wellbeing; why creatives are best placed to restart our society after lockdown; what is tactical urbanism and how can it reshape cities; innovative strategies for digital
placemaking that work with media architecture; other ways of being in the world through mindful walking and urban play; reconnecting the neighbourhood by building hyperlocal economies and communities; and the restorative power of green and blue spaces in urban environments.
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1:00 PM / Workshop
Katy Grennier, DSIL Global
Social Technologies: Taking MOD into the future - a sense making workshop
A time to use more social technologies to discover what has mattered during the Mindset of Design festival. What questions do you want to carry forward and how can you implement these into your life.
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2:30 PM / Keynote
Grant Verhoeven, Leadership and career consultant
You can’t be your own blind spot spotter
How to overcome your weaknesses and design your work for maximum impact, fulfilment and happiness.
Sometimes the unobvious things are the things we do the best.
It is so easy to focus on our weaknesses. They often stare us in the face and yell at us “you need to improve!!!” Likewise, the things we do well or naturally take little or no work, so we take them for granted or think everyone else can do them… right?
As a result, much of our time at work is spent “fixing” things or working on our weaknesses. In this interactive session, Grant will be exploring how to identify blind spots, overcome weaknesses and most importantly focus on our strengths in our world of work.
We will cover:
- Why we tend to focus on our weaknesses rather than our strengths
- How to adopt a mindset of looking at our strengths and why we often can’t see them
- The 3 ways to identify the markers that guide how we should spend our time
This is a session for you if you are:
- A manager or leader of a team and wondering how to get the best from your people
- Wanting to gain a greater sense of fulfilment at work and have more fun each and every day
- Feeling stressed, overwhelmed or pressured at work, and wanting to reclaim a sense of control
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3:45 PM / Masterclass
Dr Mark Bradford, BeWeDō®
Designing possibilities together with BeWeDō® movement
BeWeDō® moves conversation to action for collective creativity, leadership development and decision-making. The unique approach literally creates space to get people moving with others – physically, mentally and socially – to explore an issue and then take the first steps to make a change.
During BeWeDō®, everyone’s voice matters!
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3:45 PM / Keynote
Raul Sarrot, Freshfish
Flow, fostering a culture of innovation and creativity in hybrid environments.
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6:30 PM / *Add-on*
The Sensonauts
Sensory Chocolate Experience
This is a delicious and unusual session, weaving together mindfulness, pleasure principles, craft chocolate and sound. We explore how sound changes taste, with fun chocolate experiments based on academic research, and with sound samples recorded specially by musician Ed Zuccollo.
This was originally created for Baron Hasselhoff’s Carnival of Chocolate as part of the Wellington On a Plate food festival and includes a taste sampler of Baron Hasselhoff's wonderful craft chocolates for each person, matched to the experiments.