DesignThinkers Vancouver 2024 highlights

Over 700 Creatives came together in Vancouver for our 2024 DesignThinkers Conference and learned something new about themselves at the workshops, took inspiration from our speakers, met industry suppliers and connected with colleagues — there was something for everyone on May 28-29 at the our 6th DesignThinkers Conference in Vancouver.

The conference featured talks by Tina Roth Eisenberg, Ashlea Spitz RGD, PUPILA Design Studio, Dori Tunstall, Paloma Rincon, Lorenzo Decicco, Apples Milkovich, Lisa Congdon, Freddie Ost & Erik Kockum, Johnny Cupcakes, Wil Arndt, Irene Pereyra, Kevin Hawkins, Ellen Lupton, Tomasz Opasiński, Rich Tu and Jessica Hische.

Below we share some takeaways from the presentations: 

"If I could tell my 25-year-old version one thing, it would be always listen to the whispers of your heart. But not only that, trust your instincts. Trust your heart and trust yourself. In fact, I have a big giant banner in my bathroom that says, trust yourself. I'm still working on it." — Tina Roth Eisenberg, Founder OF Tattly, CreativeMorning & Teuxdeux

"Sometimes projects aren't about the money. I'm not here to be like money and creativity are mutually exclusive and they cannot exist in the same space. If you guys know me well enough, you know that's not my vibe. But I also have come to realize, over the course of my life through experience, which projects are worth taking on if the budget isn't quite where it should be or if there's some other promise of something." — Jessica Hische, Lettering artist and Design Leader & NYT best-selling Author

"AI should not be scary, but there is a way to approach it. I consider AI to be a dragon. If you stand in its way, it'll burn you. If you try to fight it, it'll kill you. But if you make friends with it, you can climb its back and ride it."— Kevin Hawkins, Director of Head of Design & Research at Amenitiz

"I've been using ChatGPT as a therapeutic tool, essentially to talk about my pain. And I wanted to reengage with the concept of a person after they'd been lost. That was something very interesting to me. I didn't want to recreate the person, but just engage with the idea of the person. So, I took my dad's obituary and I trained ChatGPT off this one piece of universal truth, quote unquote truth." — Rich Tu, Partner & Executive Creative Director, Sunday Afternoon

"In terms of positionality, indigenous people are native to the land, but we also have to remind ourselves they were the first communities who were enslaved. They are the original custodians of land. This is what we articulate when we go through our land acknowledgment. And they've been fighting assimilation for the last 500 years." — Dori Tunstall, Design Anthropologist, Author and Design Leader

Attendees have access to the recordings of talks on the event platform Pheedloop for the next three months after which time they will be made available to all RGD Members in our Video Library. 

Registration for DesignThinkers Toronto on November 7–8 (in-person and streaming) is now open. 

Register now!

Advance Early Bird rates apply until June 24. 

Thanks to Photos by Kateland for capturing DesignThinkers. Click here to view photos from the conference.

Thank you also to our Industry Partners for the event: Whitman Emorson (Branding Partner), Adobe, Forge Media + Design, (Development Partner), MET (Print Partners), Spicers (Paper Partner), Porter Airlines (Official Airline Partner) and Vancouver Community College. To our Gold sponsors: MITCHELL, Northeastern University – Vancouver, Vancouver Film School And to our Silver and Bronze sponsors Dalton Maag, Dinamo, Glenmore Custom Print & Packaging, IDEA School of Design, Imperial Dade Canada Inc., Issues Magazine Shop, Modern Design Academy, Photos by Katelandl, Porchlight Press and ThinkNW.