Mick Champayne
Mick Champayne is a Staff UX designer on Google Search’s Delight team who moonlights as an illustrator. In a nutshell, she loves internet culture, navel-gazing about the future, and connecting people through visual storytelling and concept-driven design. From doodles to design, she’s always scheming ways to inject a little personality and friendliness into anything she makes, and she’s happiest when her work can spark a conversation.
The Anatomy of a Happy Accident
In an era of AI doom-scrolling and hustle-culture-induced burnout, it’s hard not to feel like your creative brain is perpetually running on fumes. As a professional overthinker and empath who feels things deeply, the pressure to be creative and make big, meaningful work can often feel impossible.
In this talk, I’ll share the story of my slow, unglamorous, and accidental recovery. I’ll deconstruct a series of tiny, disconnected creative acts—quick daily doodles, manic learn-a-new-skill sprints, weird side quests, and frankly, drawing a lot of butts—that weren’t part of a grand plan, but pure instinct just to feel something again. I’ll also touch on how I leaned into my fears (existential crises, traumas, AIs—oh my!), turning anxiety into a quirky collaborator. It’s a story about how this ‘learning by making’ journey led me to a job designing intentional accidents at Google, proving that the weird things you do to save yourself can accidentally build a powerful creative engine for your entire life.
