7th MADRASTERS MEETUP - UX Design
The Madrasters is a Chennai based Design Community that is committed to expanding the Design Knowledge by conducting design meetups and workshops. Including myself, Madrasters has helped a lot of people to reach their goal of becoming a designer. I would gladly say that if it was not for this community, I would never have stepped into this design career. This blog is something that I can contribute to the design community.
The Madrasters have been conducting meetups regularly, a platform where fellow designers meet, connect and learn. The 7th Designers meetup happened on 9th December, 2017 and the theme of the meetup was UX. The meetup had two speakers who shed their knowledge on tangible UX, a Design Activity — Attai Padam,a FACT-FACT-FACT session and two new designers were given opportunity to showcase their portfolio. I was working under the social media team and was given the task of my updating Instagram stories.
The core organising members of this meetup met 3 weeks back at Madrasters HQ to discuss about the planning and allocation of work. Tasks were assigned to the organising members. Three weeks of planning made it so easy for everyone to organise the meetup and execute it with no hassle. The day before the meetup, the logistics team worked hard to prepare all the materials required for the big day. From paper cups to standees, everything was taken care of my the logistics team.
On the day of the meetup, the logistics team, social media team(including me) and the MC of the event met early in the morning at 7 am. We then transported all the required materials to the place where the meetup was about to happen, IIT research park, Tidel park, Chennai. The Meetup hall and Registration desk were set up by 9 am. The meetup then started exactly by 10 am.
Our MC, Suhail Mohammed with his cheerful attitude and enthusiasm did a very good job. He kept the audience involved with his jokes and funny noises. We started the event with the Design activity — ATTAI PADAM (translation: Cover Picture). 140 people attending the event were split into 8 teams and were given the task to design a Book cover in three different genres — Horror, Comedy, Fantasy. They were given mock book covers and sketches to design. This went on for 45 minutes and one from each team were asked to present the idea behind the cover photo after the break.
We, then had our first speaker Siddarth, about him. He enlightened us with his knowledge on the Designing for IOT. His engineering background was clearly evident as he mentioned the structure of IOT products and the need for a designer to know the structure to design IOT products. He also gave examples of both good and badly designed IOT products. This was very informative as IOT products are in a boom phase and it is necessary for a designer to gain knowledge to sustain.
Followed by his speech, 15 min break followed. Snacks and drinks were provided by the organising team. This break gave people the time to connect with fellow designers. I met a few passionate designers and got a chance to connect with them.After the break, presentation of book covers designed in activity earlier took place. It was very interesting to see people with different ideas collaborate together to create something spectacular.
This was followed by the Limelight Session where two new people are given the opportunity to showcase their portfolio. The idea of this is to bring recognition to the designer. The first lime light speaker was Ramya Vardhan who showcased her impressive zentangle art, portraits, hair sketches and illustrations. The second lime light speaker was Sathish Kumar Jain, a Visual designer who showcased his innovative animations, User Interfaces and Interactions.
This was followed by the FACT-FACT-FACT session hosted by our MC Suhail. He gave us some interesting facts to feed our minds. Next in the agenda was the Prabhakaran (Prob), a design researcher and expert. His wide knowledge was a thirst quencher to everyone who attended the meet. Though he focused only on Future of Interactions part this time, his clearly conveyed his message “ the need to think out of the box” while designing for mobile. He demonstrated a UI that broke the normal guidelines of mobile display, touch functionalities and more. He also offered to provide 2 dribbble invites to people who in the future submitted an out of the box mobile interface breaking the standard guidelines. He also shared his thoughts on designers needing to design for VR and AR.
The meet finally ended on a happy note with a Photograph of all the smiling faces who attended the meetup along with the madrasters team. After this, I could see networking happening all over the place. I felt that all the motives were the meetup were satisfied with Networking being the cherry on top of the cake.
Finally, Jack who organised this entire meetup, founder of Madrasters gave a talk to all the core members of the madrasters and the organising team. The day ended well with lot of fun, positive vibe and knowledge filled mind.
Finally, all this would not have been possible because of this team.
