Our first Converge

After what the world has been through over the last few years, it felt great for us to run and have such a huge amount of interest in our first Converge conference in London last week. The mood leading up to it was that people are once again ready for in-person events and all that goes with them; learning from great speakers and socializing with like-minded people.

It’s never a guarantee when running events how people will respond so it was incredibly gratifying that on the lead-up to the event, we sold out and had quite a waitlist building up! Over 300 people interested in getting together to chat about design systems is pretty amazing, alongside the Into Design Systems meet-up in Munich that had incredible attendance both as part of World Design Systems Week. It shows what an appetite and interest there is in this space – there is so much to share and learn from as there is to know that you’re in a community that feels the same way.

Seeing the queue out of Conway Hall in the morning for registration really brought it home…that it was really happening and people were here in numbers. With zeroheight and YLD folks staffing registration and helping people settle in, there was a real buzz about the place. It’s a great building that has real character, that has often been used by London Web Standards for their State of the Browser event in the past.

Amy Hupe started us off with a great challenge around contribution to design systems. How the ideal of having people contribute is at odds with the systems around the system itself…(almost) calling for revolution. Her humor shined through a really thought-provoking session to get the day started. Lily Dart followed, taking the culture of our systems and challenging us to think about the mismatch between what we think the org culture is and what it actually is encouraging the audience to discuss with their nearest attendees. The room erupted with chatter – another indication of how good it was to all be together at something like this.

Inayaili León gave us some thoughtful insight into design ops and how it can be applied to design teams. Maybe it’s something you’re already doing but haven’t recognised the role DesOps can play in an organisation – the glue that enables design. Dave House knitted together the worlds of being a Volkswagen enthusiast with design systems demonstrating how many very different vehicles can and have been made from the same chassis, much in the same way that the platform and core components of a design system can cater for many different brands.

I had the after lunch session. After these last few with speaking at in-person events not being an option it was weird feeling those old nerves come back. It was great to share the Eames Powers of Ten video I first saw as a child and use that as a way to link the higher level aspects and the details of design system through component anatomy. Imran’s talk on Reflective Practice had the room hanging on his words as it started in a deeply personal way and gave us all an appreciation of looking inwards to improve how we interact with others; being more mindful of the impact we have.

Rounding up the day, we had Dan Mall who has that air of calm as he weaves his story that contained references to his ‘Design Systems in 90 Days’ workbook. Loads of great real world examples of work with his clients and lessons learned, in particular tackling you most used, most gnarly component over apparently simple ones like buttons.

We’d like to give a massive shout out to everyone that attended and helped us spread the word to make the event such a success. Big thanks to all of our speakers for stepping up and giving such awesome talks. Props to our community partners Design Systems London and the folks at YLD for coming on board, in particular Luis as our co-host on the day.

Videos of all the talks will be made available soon through our YouTube channel.

Same time next year, yeah?