[In-Person] Design Career Talks: From Big Companies To Building Solo With AI

About this event

Hey, Product Friends! 👋 Welcome to Tokyo Design Community — Leading AI-driven product design communities in Japan, where design meets technology, business, and the tools shaping what comes next. We're all about practical insights, real-world experience, and learning together. This session, we're getting honest about something a lot of us are quietly figuring out: what it actually means to build solo with AI and how that compares to designing inside a big product team. Our speaker, Simon Callsen, spent 7+ years on the design team at Shopify before stepping into solo building here in Tokyo. Now he's creating on his own, with AI as a teammate and he'll walk us through what he's building today, what changed in how he works, and what he gained (and lost) along the way. 🚀 You might be wondering... ✨ What does a solo designer's workflow actually look like when AI does the heavy lifting? ✨ How is building alone with AI different from shipping inside a team at a company like Shopify? ✨ Which parts of "the team" can AI replace and which parts really can't? ✨ What new skills matter most when you're the designer, builder, and shipper all at once? ✨ Are other designers feeling this shift too and what have they learned from it? What we'll do together: 1. Simon's keynote sharing his unfiltered career stories, insights and best practice with AI 2. Q&A and honest conversation about where product design is heading 3. Networking This isn't a polished keynote. It's a real, open conversation with real human connections about how we're all learning to build in this new AI era. 💬 Meet Our Speaker — Sarah Tan Topic: Building Your Design Career Through Side Doors Sarah will share practical ways on how passion projects, personal branding, and being visible can create "side doors" into unexpected opportunities that will help boost one's design career, which is something that helped her a lot in her design career. Sarah Tan is an award-winning Product Designer specialising in AR, VR, and AI. She has designed innovative digital experiences for leading technology companies including Google, Meta, Adobe, and Atlassian. Passionate about emerging technologies, Sarah focuses on creating products that combine cutting-edge innovation with thoughtful, user-centred design. ​Beyond her professional work, Sarah is an internationally recognised speaker who has presented at major conferences including SXSW and the Global AI Summit. She is also a mentor and advocate for diversity in technology, helping to empower the next generation of designers and technologists. Her contributions have been recognised through numerous industry awards and global honours, including being named one of the Global Top 100 Women of the Future in Emerging Technology, a B&T 30 Under 30 Tech winner, and an Innovator of the Year award recipient. Her work and insights have also been featured in Forbes, 7NEWS, and other leading media outlets. Meet Our Speaker — Simon Callsen Topic: From Squad to Solo: Building My Own Tools with AI A look at what changes (and what doesn't) when you go from designing on a team within a large company – to building solo, with AI tools Simon is a Senior UX Designer with 7+ years at Shopify, where he helped craft the order management and rule engine powering 3+ million merchants worldwide — working shoulder-to-shoulder with Product and Engineering to take products from proposal to release. He brings depth in content design and research alongside strong visual design, with a knack for turning complex problems into polished, well-crafted experiences. In 2025 he relocated to Tokyo to study Japanese full-time, and he's now building personal projects solo at scallsen.ca (https://scallsen.ca/) — currently leaning into a playful retro/pixel aesthetic. He's here to share the honest version of that shift: from a big product team to building on his own, with AI in the loop. 🎨 Our Community: Where Curiosity Meets Opportunity, Theory Meets Practice 💫 We're a diverse