Alchemy: New Zealand Design, Tech & Business

Creating a feast for the eyes, heart and mind • Natasha Lampard, Co-founder, Webstock

Episode Summary

Natasha Lampard is a major reason Webstock is one of the world’s top design and tech conferences. She explains how her passion for the web intersected with her childhood fondness for throwing parties to create a festival that attracts the most talented, inspiring leaders in the industry to come from around the world to New Zealand to share their expertise and their stories. Full show notes and links available at AlchemyPodcasts.com

Episode Notes

Natasha Lampard is a major reason Webstock is one of the world’s top design and tech conferences. She explains how her passion for the web intersected with her childhood fondness for throwing parties to create a festival that attracts the most talented, inspiring leaders in the industry to come from around the world to New Zealand to share their expertise and their stories.

Tash does everything with a lot of heart and soul. You experience that when you go to Webstock and it's what's so inspiring about our conversation.

Some key themes emerged from our conversation that I want to highlight:

• First off, the importance of giving a damn: sweating the details,
  constantly improving your craft, deeply caring about the impact of
  your decisions, and staying focused on who will be impacted by those
  decisions.
• Which leads to the next theme. As makers, the work we do
  is in service of others. Our work needs to serve a wide range of
  people, who don’t all think the same, don’t all look the same and
  don’t all behave the same. Natasha describes her belief in a Japanese
  philosophy called Omotenashi – a spirit of service and hospitality.
  We have to be mindful of the responsibility we have as makers to
  think about the long term impact on society, not just our short term
  personal gains.
• And finally, the power of words. How words are the
  starting point for great ideas, words inspire people, words set a
  mood, words also connect us, words help us understand the greater good that we can all achieve together.

Below are links to some of the people, ideas and talks we discussed:

• Natasha gave an inspiring talk about Omotenashi and how it relates to the design & tech industry
• Natasha also wrote a short essay on Omotenashi
• Sacha Judd's funny and fascinating talk on how the tech industry can and must embrace diversity
• Sacha Judd's slides and notes from her Webstock talk
• Nat Dudley's revealing talk on design patterns that unconsciously exclude and alienate people
• Anil Dash's talk on creating businesses that are more humane