Presenter Profile: Chris Dammeyer is a Senior Product Designer for MetaLab, a global digital product agency based in Canada. For over a decade, Metalab has helped everyone from tiny early-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies build products that are simple, beautiful, and easy to use. Clients include Slack, Headspace, Coinbase, Google, and many more. He is also the leader of the Design Guild for RefractionDAO, a Decentralized Autonomous Organization looking to explore a hybrid model for music & art curation and presentation, with IRL events this year in different locations around the world and online simultaneously. Lastly, Chris is also a New Media Artist with a background in projection art and has been producing NFT artwork for over a year, including a machine learning-based piece where 100% of the profits were donated in support of old growth forest protection in his home near Vancouver, Canada.
Presentation Title: Separating Signal From Noise: NFTs, Web3, The Metaverse and Making Sense of Our Future
Outline: What is Web3? The Metaverse? NFTs? DAOs? For the past year we’ve been inundated with an entirely new vocabulary. This can be scary! Luckily, the complexity doesn’t mean it’s bad — in fact, it’s anything but. The intent of this talk is not to give tutorials or advice on how to mint an NFT or trade crypto. Rather, its intent is to provide understanding of the underlying base layer for how all these trends interlock with one another, why they’re not a new movement and why they signal a massive step forward for humanity as a whole. Because we’re in such early days, many have likened this to a new frontier or the wild west. For all the benefits and promises that Web3 entails, there are a myriad of risks and pitfalls for new and seasoned participants alike. As designers, we have a unique opportunity to be at the forefront of this new era of the internet: to solve many of the UX problems that currently exist, and to help shape the tools that will be used in the years ahead to ensure a more equitable and fair internet for everyone.