An open letter on our future

Running a conference is an exhilarating, rewarding, and humbling experience. It is more than a stage, tickets, or a venue. Getting it right means building a community, creating connection and meaning, and changing the world just a tiny bit.

Over the last three years, I’ve collaborated with incredible people across all spectrums of design, culture, and the human condition. I’ve been fortunate to bring individuals and perspectives to our stage that have changed how I think, behave, and am. Curating Design Outlook has, indeed, transformed who I am.

From Vinita, I’ve learned about intersectionality and being multifaceted; from Trudi, a sense of play and doing things differently; from Andrew, the importance of access; from Oliver, being a great coach and leader; from Leah, being a wonderful human and designer; from my dear friend Nikhil, what it means to design for everyone; and I’ve rediscovered my creative self with help from Chi, Barbara, and Rodger. And so much more.

The core concept of Design Outlook is to be broad, diverse, and different, and I’ve fallen in love with design time and time again with each presenter that has embraced our stage and our audience.

We have created an experience like no other for designers in Australia, and this year will be no different. If anything, it will exceed DO22 and DO23 combined, pushing the boundaries of what we believed possible. We are bringing together a cohort of 32 presenters that I am so awestruck by that I can hardly believe it is happening, and the immeasurable impact it will have on our community.

It is befitting, then, that this will be the last of our DO conferences.

From 2025, we will shift our focus from one large event to smaller, more focused gatherings. These will share knowledge and experiences in a more traditional learning format—an MBA-like Business School for designers, role-specific roundtables like leadership, product design, strategic design, and intimate masterclasses.

An insurmountable amount of work

Before I continue, I want to state very clearly that no one asked us to create Design Outlook, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to have pushed it this far. All the choices we’ve made to create the conference and its impact have been our own, and we would do it all again in a heartbeat.

But it should be no surprise that the amount of work it takes to pull this off is immense and consuming. Our team of volunteers collectively clocks in about 300 hours of work each year. Our industry cohort and advisory board contribute a huge amount of volunteer effort, and as owners, we dedicate around 1,000 hours annually—on top of full-time roles and growing families.

The trade-offs for us are too great, despite our love for what we do and the passion we pour into the event. We are crestfallen that we can’t continue.

In addition to the time commitment, there is also the financial risk. DO22 and DO23 were not profitable events, and the responsibility remained with us to carry the vision forward.

We believe in our mission, and in you

We fundamentally believe that design’s future is bright, and we lean with our hearts toward the warmth.

In just three years, we’ve created a movement that has elevated an incredible array of diverse design perspectives and reconnected design in meaningful ways through our open houses, leadership roundtables, and community support through meetups and other events.

We are the most diverse, affordable, accessible, and valuable conference that we’ve seen. We hope to inspire others to achieve the same values in the events they produce. We hope we have demonstrated that there is no excuse for a lack of diversity, intersectionality, or access.

This year, we will have three smart, articulate, and intelligent Asian women presenting their perspectives on taking control and imparting their own style and brand to their lives. Beverly and Mabel speak to my heart with their acknowledgment of the burden of leadership as millennials, and Rachel will dismantle the institutionalisation of imposter syndrome.

Dheeren and Finbar will transform our understanding of connectedness as neural networks, and Alison will bookend that with stories of connection over 65,000 years of Songlines.

Our international presenters, Michael, Andrew , Brendan, and Felix, will bring perspectives to design that shape perfection, who we are, and why we do what we do.

Troy, my new crush, will close the day with what it means to be human—to learn, to love, and to be confident in oneself.

This year will showcase the best of what we are and we’ll say farewell to our conference with gusto.

As tears of gratitude and humility well in my eyes, I want to say thank you to every single person who has helped to make this the most amazing, life-transforming thing I could have ever dreamed it to be.

I can’t wait to see you all at the conference and for the future of Design Outlook.

Love