What’s a developer like you doing in a design event like this?
I know nothing about design. It’s true. As a developer, I’m only concerned in understanding and using InVision inspector and Skyfonts and try to understand what designers have on their minds with changes and interactions, no more no less. And, however, I’ve enjoyed all the design events I’ve attended since I met Kalte.
Last September we went to Bilbao to attend Serifalaris, a creative-focused event with designers from all Spain. There, amazing people show what they’ve done, what they’ve been doing and, in lesser cases, show you in a 4-hour-long masterclass, all about web-developing, typography, naming and more. I enjoyed all and each one of the talks.
Seeing designers, art directors, typographers, creative directors talking about clients, projects, successes, failures, creative processes it’s empowering, challenging and motivating. You don’t have to be a creative director, a product designer or a UI/UX specialist to enjoy and have fun in a design event.
That’s because design events are more significant, funnier, less scary and way more interesting than technical/developing/IT events. Developing events are more like going to a university class than going to an event. You don’t see how other colleagues in the industry are doing in their businesses, and what they did to become successful, do some networking, drink a few beers or glasses of wine and have fun.
I’ve been 8 hours working, and I do not want to spend my afternoon doing some intro to Kubernetes, I can do that back home. Instead, I want to hear how that fresh startup is scaling up its business, how they work, how they manage success and failure, even technically: explaining methodologies, languages, frameworks, techniques or technologies.
If you’re a designer and you attend an IT-related event, you’ll get lost. Everything is so technical, it’s almost discriminatory. You cannot attend this event unless you’re, or about to be, an IT professional. We even have problems with university students! Not to mention the absence of girls in our industry (that’s another post).
We need to embrace the experience as a way of doing talks. We need to embrace our failures and successes as a way of educating others. We cannot be talking about cooling frameworks nobody barely uses in production environments forever, and we need to start talking about how we’ve been three years in business or how we got that big client contract.
I’m not a hater of technical talks, but there’s like a massive amount of them, and nobody’s talking about their work. I’d like to know more about you and how you achieved THAT solution. I don’t want to discover another solution for a problem I’m handling differently in production. I want YOUR answers.
I want to invite my friends who have no clue of a Hello World, and I want them to see how cool is our job. Because it’s cool and it’s creative, and we should be proud of it, it’s impressive enough to show it to the world, even if it fails, we learn and try the rest of us to understand why and how to avoid it. One day I want to ask:
What’s a designer like you doing in a development event like this?
