Hello! My name is Morten Rand-Hendriksen, and one of my many titles is “Speaker at Tech Events.” Which is likely why you find yourself on this page. To make it easy for you to find what you’re looking for, I’ve broken the page into sections:
- 2023 talks for your event
- Short official bio
- Contact info
- Past talks, topics, and videos
- A longer personal note on who I am, what I do, and other things.
2023 Talks for Your Event
For 2023 I’m offering three talks for three different audiences. The presentation of all my talks is tailor-made to your conference.
We Broke It. Now We Fix It: Towards an Ethics of Tech and Design
Audience: Tech practitioners, with special focus on designers.
Tech has matured. Gone are the days of moving fast and breaking things. Now comes the hard work of accepting the responsibilities handed to us by our success. This talk is not your typical hour of moral handwringing about how everything went wrong; It’s about where we go from here, and how we ensure our work contributes to a fairer, more equitable society where design and technology grants everyone the capabilities to do and be what they have reason to value. Historical perspective, political analysis, practical applications, and license for each member of the audience to claim their power and build the future, this talk has it all.
Supercharge Your Development With GitHub Codespaces and an AI pair programmer
Audience: Developers
Expanded from a talk created for An Event Apart San Francisco in 2022 this talk is a deep dive into using VS Code in the cloud with GitHub Codespaces and how to take advantage of the emerging power of AI including GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT to supercharge your development process.
AI Is Here. Now We Build the Future!
Audience: Tech executives, stakeholders, and practitioners
With the untapped power of AI comes new responsibilities to build futures where we can all live and thrive. This talk challenges the audience to reframe the conversation around AI from “show me the money” to “let’s make sure we get this right.” We have a once-in-a-humanity opportunity here to define what it means to work side-by-side with our own creations. This talk is the spark that starts a conversation about our shared future.
Speaker bio
Morten Rand-Hendriksen’s passion for practical ethics in technology has shaped his fifteen-year career working on and with the web. Combining a masters’ degree in philosophy with his experiences working in and then teaching web development and design, Morten has seen how design shapes the future. He has written and spoken on applied practical ethics in technology and design for the past decade and believes the future needs a tech industry centered around ethics.
Morten resides in Vancouver, Canada with his family where he creates online and in-person courses as a Senior Staff Instructor at LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com). He teaches interaction design at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and is an active contributor to several open source projects.
In his spare time Morten plays with his son, dances with his wife, runs a tech ethics book club, and discusses the philosophy and politics of the internet with anyone interested.
Contact
I am on the internet! You can get in touch with me:
Talks, topics, and videos
.jpg){kind=link}
I’ve spoken at a myriad of tech and academic events over the years including An Event Apart (December 2022, April 2020, October 2020), UX Nordic, Radical Research Summit, Smashing Conference, HighEdWeb, WPCampus, PressNomics, TechDays, JSDay, Make Web Not War, MIX, WordCamps including US and EU, Meetups, podcasts, and more. My talks cover a wide range of topics, mainly tech and design ethics, web design and development, and how the web and the internet works. Each of my talks is tailored to a specific event and its audience.
Some of my recent talks (available by request)
- Supercharge Your Development with GitHub Copilot (created for An Event Apart 2022)
- Code Worth Writing for a Future Worth Building (created for UX Nordic 2022)
- Modern Tools, Modern Layout, Modern Web (created for An Event Apart 2021)
- Practical Ethics for the Modern Web Designer (created for An Event Apart 2020)
If you’re interested in these (or other related) talks or workshops, get in touch!
Examples
To get an idea of what my talks are like, here are a few video samples.
Practical Ethics for the Modern Web Designer
An Event Apart 2021
I Thought We Were Making World Peace
Smashing Conference Freiburg, 2018
The Ethics of Web Design
WordCamp Europe 2018
CSS Grid Changes Everything
WordCamp Europe, 2017
Morten: An Introduction
People often ask me what I do, as in “how do you make a living.” My immediate answer is “I help people make sense of the web, the internet, and how they shape us.” If I had to put a label on that, I’d say I’m an educator, front-end developer, interaction designer, speaker, and author. Which to be honest is not one label but several. I have the official, and somewhat confusing, title of Senior Staff Instructor at LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com) meaning I spend most of my time figuring out and teaching web standards, design, UX, and future technologies to millions of people around the world. I also sometimes teach Interaction Design at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, write articles for various publications including Smashing Magazine, and contribute to open source projects.
My passion is helping people not just understand but take ownership of the technologies available to them through the global network we call the internet. I do this by making human connections and helping people discover their agency, their capabilities, and their power as citizens of the web.
By education I am a philosopher, by culture I am a Norwegian, by privilege, luck, and chance I live close to Vancouver, Canada, and by genetics I am a white northern European man. As such, I make efforts to remind myself in every interaction what privileges I carry with me and my responsibilities to use them for good. It is the amalgamation of all these traits which makes me the educator, developer, and designer I am, and it is because of these traits my talks and my work focuses on the societal impacts of design and development and how to build futures we all want to live in.
Finally, when I’m not working I spend my time playing with my son, reading philosophy and sci-fi, having conversations about the internet and how it shapes our society, and wearing out my shoes on the ballroom dance floor with my wife.