How Do We Design Vibrant Communities?
Nila Rezaei Co-founder & Design Director RK Collective
As designers, We have never had more tools, more methods, more frameworks, And yet the feeling of collective life, of shared prosperity, of genuine community, has been slowly slipping. The feeling of collective prosperity, of participation, of belonging, has narrowed, and is almost fading. This keynote begins by asking what a vibrant community actually is: not as an aspiration, but as something with real characteristics that can be named, protected, and designed toward.
Drawing on community-led projects built through reclaimed materials, participatory storytelling, and shared cultural memory, Nila argues that designers carry more agency in this moment, so how can we use that agency? A call to return design to its original purpose: creating the conditions for people to feel prosperous, connected, and part of something larger than themselves.
Design Shapes Context, Context Shapes Design
Cornel Steyn; Jess Witt Principal Consultant: Strategy & Design Versent
Over five years of working together across multiple projects, we've accumulated real, practical learnings about what it means to bring genuine context awareness into your design process, and this talk is the distillation of that. Through working case studies drawn from our own practice, we walk through the five dimensions of context, showing not just the theory but how we actually apply it day to day. People love to see how others work, and we pull back the curtain on that in a way that's honest, practical, and immediately useful. It's a technical design talk at heart, but it leaves you with something more: a redefinition of the designer's role in a world increasingly shaped by AI. You'll leave with tools you can use tomorrow, a renewed sense of purpose, and a completely ruined relationship with pesto.
Re-architecting PeerChat for on-demand mental health support
Nadine Raydan; Emily Smith Senior Product Manager ReachOut Australia
Young people’s expectations of the services they engage with are shaped by their experiences of the broader digital world. In an era defined by hyper-personalised and near-instant online experiences, mental health services are evolving to be just as responsive.
ReachOut Australia intentionally redesigned its PeerChat service model and product to better support changing help-seeking behaviours and address the high-friction entry-point that failed to meet users at their peak moment of need. PeerChat is a text-based one-to-one support service in which young people aged 16–25 can connect with a trained peer worker who has lived experience of mental health challenges. The service was designed to provide an evidence-based offering to young people who lack connection and want to feel heard and understood by someone who can relate. By transitioning PeerChat from a traditional booked model to an on-demand service, the interdisciplinary team removed the barriers of ‘scheduled support’ in favour of ‘in-the-moment’ connection.
Join ReachOut’s Senior Product Manager, Nadine Raydan and Emily Smith, Peer Work Manager, as they discuss PeerChat’s strategic pivot and transition from a booked service to an on-demand model and share the impact of these changes. They’ll share insights from the end-to-end journey of this transition, detailing the initial drivers for change, co-creating with frontline mental health workers and young people, and the outcomes and lessons from the first year of service.