Design Groups London
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#5 - semiotics ideation worskhop
Sat, Oct 24, 9:30 AM**Meet likeminded UX professionals and experience a new way to ideate with a researcher at UAL.** Our next event is a bit different - one of our members, Mary, is working on her thesis project for UAL's MA in User Experience Design and is hosting a session at the university for us to try it out. She's built a card-based ideation method that uses visual symbolism and semiotics to trigger unexpected ideas - almost like tarot meets design thinking! There's also a custom AI agent she's developed that plays the role of an "idea psychic," helping you reframe problems and push past obvious solutions. She needs people to use it on a real brief so she can observe what works and what doesn't. You’ll get to try an unusual creative method and help shape a member’s research project, while also having the opportunity to meet and spend time discussing with other creatives. *** **The Details:** * **Location:** London College of Communication (UAL), Elephant & Castle, London SE1 6SB * **Capacity:** We’re keeping this to a small group to ensure everyone can connect and contribute. Please ensure your RSVP is up to date and let us know if you're unable to attend. * **What to bring:** **Bring some ID on the day for entry to UAL.** * **Vibe:** Friendly and relaxed! *** **Why Join?** If you’re a designer or researcher who wants to use your skills for more than just conversion, come say hi. It’s a chance to meet like-minded people and consider how design can solve universal human problems. **Who is this for?** Our events are for UX designers, researchers and other strategic and creative thinkers who are passionate about using their skills for social good, not just profit. Please note that this is not a networking event, or a place to find a job. **Who are the hosts?** Mary is a UX designer from Iran, currently based in London pursuing her masters in Experience Design at UAL. Max is a London based design researcher. Until recently he was based in Tokyo, where he ran a small design agency and spent over 10 years as a meetup organizer. He's exploring ways to bring designers together to use our skills to work on meaningful problems. \*This event is being advertised on multiple sites, so the actual number of attendees will be different to what appears on meetup.
Harms mapping: What's the worst that could happen?
Thu, Oct 15, 4:30 PMMost teams are good at asking can we build it? Far fewer have a practice for asking what happens if we do? Harms mapping is that practice. It's a structured way of finding the ways a product, service or experience could hurt people, early enough that you can still do something about it. Not a compliance exercise, and not a feel-good one either. Teams that do it well find opportunities others miss, avoid expensive rework, and build things people actually trust. This is a working session, not a talk. UX for Change Fellow, Christina Lai, will introduce the method, and then we'll use it on something real. **The real thing:** East London Waterworks Park is a volunteer-led charity turning a 14-acre former depot on Lea Bridge Road into a biodiverse park with natural swimming ponds, forest schools and community spaces. They're also our partners on the UX for Change Fellowship. They do something remarkable: they invite people to help shape something that doesn't exist yet. Children, residents, people whose views on green space have never been asked for. We'll map the harms in that invitation: what it promises, who it reaches, who it leaves out, and what it costs the people who say yes. **Why this matters beyond ELWP:** The EU AI Act contains two duties worth knowing about. One demands to tell people when they're talking to a machine and mark AI-generated content. The other requires you to work out who could be harmed and how, before you deploy, and say what you'll do when it happens. On 2 August, the first became enforceable. The second isn't due until December 2027. You don't have to wait for the law to ask the questions. That's what this evening is about. **What you'll leave with:** Not mastery. One evening doesn't make a practice, and we're not going to pretend it does. You'll leave having done it once, with a story about what surfaced that's worth telling your team next day, and with a few questions that are hard to unsee once you've asked them of your own work. Who it's for: designers, researchers, product people, engineers, anyone who makes decisions about what gets built. No prior experience needed. **Free spots available** We believe access to these conversations matters. If you'd like to be considered for one of the 5 free tickets, please fill out this short form: 👉[https://forms.gle/YgPFKeSXtZDMVaVU9](https://forms.gle/YgPFKeSXtZDMVaVU9) Bring anything that you like to bring to a workshop and an open mind. We'll do the rest. Doors 5:30. We start at 6:00 sharp and finish at 8:30 pm
THE BAYSWATER REVIVAL
Sat, Oct 24, 11:00 AM(pictured: PLP's 'Park Modern' overlooking Hyde Park) Bayswater’ was ‘Bayard’s Watering Place’, for horses, where the Oxford Road from London, along the north side of Hyde Park, bridged the Westbourne Brook. It has been, at times, seedy, shabby, and in places, slummy. It's isolated, on the ‘wrong side of the park’\*, and outclassed by its neighbours, posh Tyburnia and trendy Notting Hill. Today's Bayswater is the outcome of rapid, disorganised development by builder-speculators, without a master plan: a ‘furious crescendo’, ‘borrowing Nash’s stucco uniform’\*\* of residential terraces in the years leading up to WW1. Summerson says: ‘after 1850 it is rare to find any architect of good reputation designing estates’. In 1868 a steamy, smoky railway was driven through it, and after WW2 multiple streets of damaged houses on the north side were demolished to build the Tecton’s Hallfield Estate, containing 656 flats for 2,362 people. Its biggest thing was Whiteley’s Department Store, in Queensway, once equal to Selfridges or Harrods, closed in 1981, replaced by a mall in 1989, and finally by the ‘Six Senses Hotel’ last year. That was the end of its role as a shopping destination. Now Bayswater is ‘undergoing an exhilarating transformation’, ‘evolving into a vibrant new destination for London', ‘delivering highly innovative, world-class architectural projects that blend state-of-the-art engineering with historic conservation.’\*\*\* So we’re going to meet at Paddington Square, possibly London's best example of sheer unadulterated modernism, soaring above the Bakerloo Line Station at Paddington, then use the boulevards of Tyburnia, the dual-carriageways of their day, to reach Gloucester Terrace: 800m of straight, level, complete, continuous terraces, forming the boundary of Bayswater. As we turn in to Craven Road, the first thing you’ll notice is the sudden, precipitous fall in level, in the mews entrances on either side. In fact, we are walking directly above the subterranean River Westbourne, AND the tunnels of the 1868 Metropolitan Railway extension from Paddington, undertaken at the behest of Parliament, to a new station called ‘Bayswater’, 600m to the west. But Bayswater’s still full of unique features, like Kenneth Frampton’s ‘Corringham’, the UK’s only private ‘scissors-plan’ block of flats, where all the rooms are connected by short staircases: why didn’t that idea catch on? We’ll see the ‘Sham Fronts’, hiding that railway, and, for the first 40 years, its smoke and steam, in Leinster Gardens: matching exactly the 6-storey terraces on either side (except the street doors have no letterboxes). The front looks spooky, the back is positively scary. And a ‘Whispering Gallery’, better than the one in St Paul’s, in the Foster + Partners-designed ‘Six Senses Hotel’, in the 1911 building by Edwardian Baroque specialists Belcher & Joass, that was once Whiteley’s Department Store in Queensway. Between Queensway and our luncheon venue you’ll see: • Claimed as London’s 1st ‘Post-Modern’ building, CZWG’s 10 Salem Road: a very ordinary warehouse painted pink and then ‘loaded’ with symbolic and expressive features, this being the exact theory of the style. • An achingly Instagram-able street, Bark Place, of linked semi-detached cottages with arched windows, whose owners appear to have cooperated so that all the most beautiful pastel colours are used, but only once. Rather impressive. • Less than 100m apart, all completed between 1878-80, and all listed, the New West End Synagogue, the Aghia Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral, and St Matthew, an ‘Early English’ (a Gothic Revival style) Parish Church with a remarkable tall and slim, pinnacled spire. • A fragment of that Bayswater development inheritance, ‘back-to-front’, (one-sided) terraces, their fronts facing the backs of the next, with street trees, perhaps once intended to be part of a central garden square, planted in the narrow footways, the massive trunks now filling their full width (Ossington Street and others): one has to walk, carefully, in the road! Venue for our refreshments, ‘The Champion’ PH, at the very south-west tip of Bayswater, marks the boundary with Kensington, at the road called ‘Notting Hill Gate’, after the tollgate on the Oxford Road approaching the district called Notting Hill, a real hill whose summit was in Ladbroke Grove. After lunch, in a new feature of USW events, you are invited to pass through the security checkpoints--in place only because it is a private road--and having promised not to take any photographs, join me for a gentle bonus ‘stroll’ down the entire 800m of the Kensington Palace Gardens, with its trees at their most spectacular. It is a unique in all London, lined with 30 vast mansions, developed in the 1840’s, to fund improvements to Kensington Palace, on land formerly used for its kitchen gardens. Many are now home to embassies or ambassadors’ residences, adorned with flags and emblems. At the very end, in Palace Green, there is the house Philip Webb designed for the artist George Howard, and the one the writer W M Thackeray designed for himself, before we head to Gloucester Road Station for onward travel. Hope you can come! Andy \*’Louis Mancini’, in ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’, 1949 \*\*Sir John Summerson, Georgian London, pp.23, 290 \*\*\* from Messrs Fenton Whelan’s site hoardings
NSLondon 2026.5 at Fresha
Thu, Oct 15, 5:30 PMJoin us for our next NSLondon hosted by Fresha! We have two great talks lined up, plus time to chat and meet others in the community. We can’t wait to see you there! RSVP early to secure your spot. If your plans change so you can’t make it, update your RSVP so others can attend. 💬 **Talks**: **Phil Pegden** — *“Teaching My Dog To Fly”* This talk will focus on RealityKit on Apple Vision Pro and show how easy it is to use - even from the perspective of an amateur game developer. You will learn about how different components of RealityKit can come together to make a game. **Alex Ozun** — *“Effect Systems as an alternative to DI and Unidirectional Architectures”* Swift apps depend on side effects such as disk I/O, networking, randomness, clocks, and concurrency to provide useful functionality. While essential, side effects make code harder to extend, customise, and test. Today, side effects are typically managed with DI libraries and opinionated architectural frameworks. These approaches often require significant restructuring of code, introduce invasive scaffolding and abstractions, and sometimes force code into unidirectional data flow, fragmenting logic into disconnected parts. This talk presents a powerful alternative: swift-effect: [https://github.com/Alex-Ozun/swift-effect](https://github.com/Alex-Ozun/swift-effect), an architecture-agnostic effect system that makes side effects controllable, composable, and testable while keeping application code linear and easy to reason about. 🕓 **Schedule**: 6:30 PM Arrival and check-in at reception. Food and drink will be provided. 7:00 PM Presentations start 9:00 PM Continue the conversation at a pub nearby **Check-in Process**: Arrive at 6:30 PM to complete the check-in process at our reception. Provide your full name and mention the NSLondon event to be signed in. Ensure your Meetup profile has your **full name** or send it to us in a private message at least 48 hours before the event. If you need mobility assistance, let us know at least one day in advance. 💎 **Acknowledgments**: We'd like to thank Fresha for their generous support in hosting this event. **NSLondon** is a community-driven group and needs your support! Contact us for information about venues, speakers, or sponsorships. Feel free to reach out with any questions. See you there! Please read our [Code of Conduct](https://nslondon.com/coc).
AI Signals #35: Evals, Guardrails and Human Behaviour
Thu, Oct 15, 5:00 PMHosted by [Zoopla](https://www.zoopla.co.uk/) and sponsored by [GlassFlow](https://www.glassflow.dev/) **Signups via Meetup are now strictly capped as we migrate off the platform, [if you can please signup via our website instead.](https://aisignals.org.uk/events/ai-signals-34-6z4m8)** Hosted by [Zoopla](https://www.zoopla.co.uk/) and sponsored by [glassflow.ai](https://www.glassflow.ai/rius?utm_source=event&utm_medium=event&utm_campaign=signals_ai_uk_151026) **Agenda** 06:00pm – Doors open 06:30pm – Welcome 06:35pm – [Amy Kuner](https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-kuner-6713a5208/), [Zoopla](https://www.zoopla.co.uk/), "House-training an agent: evals and guardrails for prod" 07:05pm – Break 07:20pm – [Armend Avdijaj,](https://www.linkedin.com/in/armend-avdijaj/) Founder and CEO, [glassflow.ai,](https://www.glassflow.ai/rius?utm_source=event&utm_medium=event&utm_campaign=signals_ai_uk_151026) "The missing observability layer for self-improving agents" 08:00pm – [Adi Talmor](https://www.linkedin.com/in/adi-talmor/), [Blackmont Consulting](https://www.blackmontconsulting.com/), "AI Isn't the Hard Part. Human Behaviour Is." Please note you will be unable to enter the venue before 6.00pm. RSVPs will close 24 hours before the event, you may be unable to register after this time but you can still watch online. If you can't join us in person [you can watch remotely via our YouTube channel.](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCltpBjuja5THK34tlGGFMTg) Our hosts may require that we provide a list of all attendees, please ensure that you register with a name that matches your government issued ID or bank card: if you do not we cannot guarantee you entry to the building. Please RSVP for the event well in advance if you plan to attend in person and unRSVP if you can no longer attend as limited spaces are available. Thanks to [Zoopla](https://www.zoopla.co.uk/) for hosting and [glassflow.ai ](https://www.glassflow.ai/rius?utm_source=event&utm_medium=event&utm_campaign=signals_ai_uk_151026)for sponsoring.
Peak Autumn Textures at The Regent’s Park
Sun, Oct 18, 11:00 AMJoin us for our next meetup at The Regent’s Park / Primrose Hill for a chance to capture colours and texture of Autumn. 📍 Meeting point: Regent's Park Bakerloo tube station Bring your any camera (digital, analog, phone or video), and let’s see what we can capture! **What to expect** A friendly environment where all cameras and skill levels are welcome. This is not a workshop; if you’d like to grow your photography skills, check out our other events and workshops designed for those who want to learn more about photography techniques. **Stay connected** The day of the event, Live location will be shared on our WhatsApp group ([https://chat.whatsapp.com/Ek2mMMZioqu19CJJPoQal4](https://chat.whatsapp.com/Ek2mMMZioqu19CJJPoQal4)) **Want help with your camera?** We welcome all kind of photo and video cameras! You’re welcome to ask for tips: we’re a supportive community. However, for a proper learning experience, we recommend asking the host about 1:1 coaching sessions or checking our Meetp page for upcoming workshops. **Join our online communities** * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/friendsbyframe * WhatsApp: [https://chat.whatsapp.com/Ek2mMMZioqu19CJJPoQal4](https://chat.whatsapp.com/Ek2mMMZioqu19CJJPoQal4)
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