speaker lineup
Angela Gorden
TALK
Thinking... Why showing your work is the job now
For years, content designers earned their seat by being right. Know the guideline. Get the words right. Have the answers. Now AI is taking on more of the words, and rapid prototyping pulls teams into polished-looking solo files. As the collaborative ground content design fought for erodes, the reflex is to grip harder.
Angela makes the opposite case. When nobody knows the rules yet, hollow certainty is a weakness. Our strength is discursive: thinking out loud, being willing to be wrong in the open, holding several truths. Many of us were trained to hide this and became sticklers for process and authority. Yet flexibility is what this moment calls for.
Drawing on her path from “wordsmith” to AI evals, she’ll cover:
The difference between authoritative and discursive intelligence, and why the discursive kind wins when the rules aren’t written yet
Why reaching for authority undermines ambiguous, non-deterministic designs
How to trade getting it right for getting something out there
How to stop waiting for permission and claim bigger work
ABOUT THIS SPEAKER
Angela Gorden works where content and model design meet.
She shapes how products use AI to talk to people in high-stakes moments and builds the evals that test whether AI gets it right.
With over a decade in UX, she’s led content and research from self-driving car onboarding for General Motors Cruise to conversational search for Zillow.
She has an MFA in writing and studied education at Stanford, which explains her long obsession with how people learn and change their minds. She lives in coastal Maine, where most of her field research happens at the eye level of a five-year-old.