Schalk Venter
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Schalk is a software engineer and product design consultant working on various personal, commercial, and open-source projects. He usually finds himself at the intersection of interaction design and engineering, having done contract work for National Treasury, The Google Foundation, Replit, Sea Monster Entertainment, Seedstars, CSS-Tricks, and various others. He has lectured in a senior capacity at the Academy of Digital Arts, codeX, Open Window, and the University of Pretoria, and co-created the Interaction Design degree at Cape Town Creative Academy. He also co-founded Front-end Development South Africa (FEDSA) and South African Product Design (ZAPD).
Accepted Talks:
Mental Illness and Vulnerability in Tech
In his seminal “Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression”, Andrew Solomon remarked that there is an entire world of silent “agonizing lives in invisible wheelchairs, dressed in invisible bodycasts".
It is becoming increasingly apparent that the tech sector is no exception. In the recent “Mental Health in Tech Survey" (https://osmihelp.org/research.html) only 30.7% of respondents indicated that they “feel comfortable discussing mental health with coworkers”. This seems unsurprising, given that when mental health was discussed only 33.6% of respondents “experienced or observed a supportive or well-handled response”.
As someone with a history of mental illness myself, I spent the last year conducting interviews with individuals struggling with mental health in the tech sector. In addition, I also interviewed legal and therapeutic practitioners to create a list of avenues of support you are legally entitled to as a South African citizen. In this talk, I hope to share some insights uncovered during this personal investigation.
