Speaking
Looking for a speaker?
I'd love to hear what you're planning. Tell me about your class, conference, event or organization and let's figure out where I can add something useful.
Invite Lara to speakGuest lectures, conference talks and workshops for students, designers, creative teams and curious humans.
I still do the work. Client sites, design systems, code, and my own music and creative technology projects on the side. When I speak, an audience gets someone who is actively building, not someone who used to.
That combination is unusual on a program built mostly from designers who talk about design or technologists who talk about technology. I move between both, plus the creative technology and music work that sits outside either box — which is exactly the territory most conference and event audiences are trying to make sense of right now.
What AI changes about creative work, what it doesn’t, and why understanding people is still more important than understanding the latest tool.
What happens when designers understand how things are actually built, from systems and code to technology and implementation.
How designers can stay useful when software is getting smarter, roles are changing and the old definitions of “designer” no longer quite fit.
Why systems, structure and good thinking matter more than whatever tool happens to be popular this year.
The interesting things that happen when design, music, technology and experimentation overlap.
My own creative technology and music work runs through all of this — it’s not a side project, it’s part of how I think.
AI platforms change fast. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and whatever comes next will keep evolving, disappearing, improving and competing. The goal isn’t to become an expert in one platform. It’s to build a workflow that can move with the technology.
This means understanding what each tool is good at, how to connect different tools, where humans need to stay in the loop, and how to build systems that aren’t held hostage by a single AI platform.
Invite Lara to speakA design system shouldn’t be something you build once, hand over and forget about. It should be alive. This approach treats systems as a place to experiment, test, learn and evolve as technology and the work change around them.
Students learn to use their systems in the real world, figure out what works, throw out what doesn’t, and keep building from there.
Invite Lara to speakA keynote, panel or 30–60 minute talk shaped around your audience and event.
A practical, honest look at working in design, technology and the creative industries.
Hands-on sessions where participants don’t just listen. They make something.
Happy to join a discussion about AI, design, creative technology, education or where the industry is heading.
It made structure the whole job.
Anyone can produce an interface now. What separates work that lasts from work that gets rebuilt in two years is whether there was a system underneath it: tokens that mean something, naming that survives a handoff, and documentation that a tool can actually read.
That is the part worth talking about, and it is the part most programs skip in favour of the software of the moment. It is also the whole idea behind teaching the thinking, not the tool.
I'd love to hear what you're planning. Tell me about your class, conference, event or organization and let's figure out where I can add something useful.
Invite Lara to speak