Aarron Walter is a keynote speaker and workshop facilitator on the topics of product design, collaboration, and running design teams.
Aarron has spoken at more than a hundred conferences, events, and companies on five continents and has delivered guest lectures at The Stanford d.school, The School of Visual Arts, Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia Institute of Technology, and more.
Interested in having Aarron speak at your event or company? Get in touch below.
Upcoming & past events
Past
June 30
Lean Product and Lean UX Silicon Valley Meetup
Online
All done!
July 28, 29
Designing for Emotion Masterclass
Smashing Conference, online
All done!
Aug 20–21
SmashingLive
online
All done!
Sept 24
MKGN
online
All done!
Oct 6
Cognition Conference
online
All done!
Oct 28-29
Designing for Emotion Masterclass
Smashing Conference, online
All done!
Mar 1-2
Designing for Emotion Workshop
The UX Conference, online
All done!
July 20
An Event Apart, Human-centered design
Online
All done!
Aug 27
Designers + Geeks
online
All done!
Sept 17
Designing Leadership Days
online
All done!
Sept 28
Designing for emotion workshop
The School of UX, online
All done!
Oct 23
Button Conference
online
All done!
Nov
Web Directions
online
All done!
Aarron’s currently speaking about …
Emotional design
Design for delight was the mantra of many teams a decade ago, but our world has changed bubbling up a complicated range of emotions in us all. It's time to do more than delight. Let's take a more sophisticated approach to design to address the challenges of our times.
How do we design experiences that build trust with skeptics, address people's fears, and are more inclusive of those who have been left out? Aarron Walter will show you how emotional design—the intersection of design and psychology—can help you and your team design better experiences for all.
You’ll learn:
How to create competitive advantage through emotional design
How to create memorable moments in the customer journey
Principles of psychology that lead to effective design
How to design for diversity and inclusion
How other companies design for mistrust, fear, and sadness
How to make the business case for emotional design
Format: 1 hour talk with Q&A session or full day workshop
Delivery: Delivered in person in a post-pandemic world or remotely
Running a better design team
Design is a medium for communication, and to do it well, we must cultivate our own communication skills. Within design teams, we do our best work when we create a culture of feedback shaped by our creative space and our design review process. Beyond the design tribe, our work thrives when it’s communicated in language that aligns to the goals of the business and invites participation early and often. In this hour-long presentation, Aarron Walter shares the experiences of real design teams at Apple, Spotify, and other organizations to show how to improve the communication of design both inside your team and with key outside stakeholders. You’ll see how to run effective design reviews and retrospectives which will help you create a culture of feedback that produces better work, helps designers sharpen their skills, and communicates the value of design by making it more transparent and inviting.
You’ll learn:
How to run effective design reviews with non-designers
How to make your team’s work visible in your company
How your team can translate design into language engineers and executives will understand
How to help designers stranded on Agile teams work more effectively
How your design team can work more effectively with other teams in your company
Format: 1 hour talk with Q&A session
Delivery: Delivered in person in a post-pandemic world or remotely
Custom talk for your team or event
Work with Aarron directly to shape a talk that delivers equal parts inspiration and practical instruction to your team or audience. Aarron’s talks are always grounded in real world design practices and leave audiences with tactics they can immediately employ in their work.
Get in touch below to start a conversation with Aarron.
What People Are Saying
“Aarron Walter brings humanity to human-centered design. He is a superb speaker, educator, author, designer, and creative leader. Both onstage and in his books and articles, Aarron has the gift of transforming complex design concepts into simple, compelling stories that are memorable, entertaining, and warmly relatable. In addition to all that, Aarron’s slide presentations are gorgeous; he’s a buttoned-up, on-time professional in every way; and he’s also one of the nicest people in our field. Hire him. You can’t go wrong.”
— Jeffrey Zeldman, An Event Apart co-founder
“Aarron is well versed with his work in designing for emotion and it’s clear how passionate he is for making a difference in this space. In such turbulent times, Aarron helped remind us how important it is to take a moment to reflect on how design effects our lives in how we feel and at work, to design for all the complexities of human emotion.”
— Toke Nygaard, Chief Creative Officer, Zendesk
“Aarron role models all the characteristics that make for a great designer and leader: humility, kindness, ridiculous smarts, and a focus on humanity. So what a pleasure to host him as part of our Outside In speaker series for our small business and self-employed team. He knocked it out of the park—we had record attendance and employees raved!”
—Kara DeFrias, Intuit QuickBooks
“Aarron kicked off our enterprise design community event this year with his talk on Designing for Emotion. His balance of storytelling and illustrative examples sparked thought provoking discussion and inspired our teams to consider the broad scale of emotion when creating products for our customers. Most importantly, he introduced concepts and frameworks for inclusive design that can easily be put into practice. Our team not only felt more energized after his talk, but also walked away with a greater understanding of how to design with empathy.”
—Evan English, Vice President Product Design & Research, American Express
“Our audiences love Aarron! A true industry thought leader and experienced public speaker, Aarron was incredibly engaging and informative, generously sharing exciting insights and grounded advice with our attendees. It was one of the most-attended and highest-rated talks we have hosted at Growth Tribe! We absolutely look forward to working with Aarron again in the future.”
—Rachel Wan, Growth Tribe
“Aarron gave a fantastic talk at Goldman Sachs. He was able to make the case for design being an endeavor that all roles contribute to, which sparked a great conversation at the firm around digital product management.”
— Steve Turbeck, Goldman Sachs
“We recently gathered all of our designers and held the first Chief Design Office Day. When it came to determining who we should invite to speak to us from the design community at large, I put Aarron at the very top of the list due to his work and leadership within the design community over the last two decades. He kicked off our event with an impactful keynote that still resonates within our design organization.”
— Greg Storey, USAA
Select past talks
Leveling Up Design Communication
An Event Apart Orlando
Designing with Empathy
Creative Mornings, Atlanta
Connected UX
Webstock in Wellington, New Zealand
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