Up.front 73

Up.front 73 is coming up! For our second meetup this year we're happy to announce our three speakers who will each present us with a talk on their very different matters of expertise. With this cross-disciplinary lineup we may again surprise you on how serious we are about broadening (y)our horizons with discussions about the meaning of nostalgia in social media, compressed design sprints to playful problem solving with VR.

Christine Lariviere: Nostalgia in the Age of Social Media: Identity as Artifact

Nostalgia is a sentimentality for the past, which may be expressed through certain consumerist behaviours: the collection and accumulation of memorabilia. In her talk, Christine asks: how do we satisfy our nostalgic impulses in the ephemeral digital age?

Christine is a social media strategist with a data-driven approach. She focuses on community building and engagement, while also leveraging social media for lead generation.

@cdlariviere (https://twitter.com/cdlariviere)

Vuk Trifkovic: Screenshots, Sticky Dots and Sketches: Compressed Design Sprints

In this talk Vuk will share his experience with "shortened" version of Design Sprint. Despite its increasingly high profile, it is not always possible to run "by the book" version of the Design Sprint. To get around this obstacle, Vuk would like to share some of his experience of running compressed version of Design Sprint - to gather critical insight from around the team, build consensus and avoid HiPPO anti-pattern.

Vuk is Product Management Lead at BCG Digital Ventures. Vuk joined his first startup back in 2002, while finishing his graduate research in GIS in Archaeology. Since then he has been working in London and Berlin on connected car app Vimcar, Rocket Internet's real estate marketplace Lamudi, property search engine Nestoria and loyalty platform Bonusbox.

http://vuk.io | @vtri (https://twitter.com/vtri)

Marie LeBlanc Flanagan: Solving problems with play

Can play be used to explore problems? In this short and probably overly personal talk, Marie will share their process for creating strange and playful experiences with interactive media.

Marie Claire LeBlanc Flanagan moved to Berlin to make experimental games and experiences. In the past year she has made *Auscault*, an experience which turns your feelings into music; *Other Hands* a VR experience expressing the permanence of your virtual choices on your physical body; *Closer* a computer vision game that uses two people's moving bodies as a shared single controller; and *TexTiles*, an award-winning game at the Wikimedia Free Knowledge Game Jam. Marie also runs Weird Canada.

marieflanagan.com (http://marieflanagan.com/) | @omarieclaire (https://twitter.com/omarieclaire)