The makings of UXUI Riga design community
It’s a chilly Friday morning on September 25th. Just before the second Covid wave in 2020. Six of us, passionate and driven enthusiasts, meeting at the local coffee shop to discuss resurrecting the UX UI Riga meetup. The same design movement, that since 2015 has ignited reasons for user experience practitioners in Riga to meet each other. However, just like many events that faded out in the dawn of the first Covid wave, it had a similar fate. We were here to fix this. The design community deserved it.
The humble beginnings
UX UI Riga meetup has been initiated by Rihards Gailums and later driven by Līga Lētiņa gathering 30 to 120 participants on every occasion and 700+ and 400+ members in Meetup and Facebook respectively. During this time many lessons have been learned starting from logistics (e.g. inconsistent core team meetings, last-minute sponsorship, and inconsistent tech setup) to the organization (e.g. unclear roles and roadmap).
We knew, that this time for this movement to be sustainable, we had to find our own personal, emotionally resonating reasons to be invested in creating the community. Some of us wanted to step out of the comfort zone of our own companies and see how designers work elsewhere. Others wanted to create a safe space where we could experiment together. And some were inspired by the vision of seeing more public services that have been sensitive to end-user needs.
We continued meeting to shape on bringing value to the design community. Especially considering the fact, it had to be done in a remote setting. We conducted design community interviews to find out what drives them and where the community would fit it. We took the community's input and worked on a community canvas resulting in alignment on our values, rules, and purpose.
We believed that by uniting the practicing and emerging designers we together will make a larger impact on digital service experience, value, and ethics in Riga and beyond. And to do that, we believed in creating an open and safe space for experimenting and encouraging each other to create quality content and share experiences. It was natural to say then —
We are a digital product and service design community for designers. Our mission is to provide a safe environment for creating quality content, sharing knowledge, experimenting together, and encouraging each other.
So,17 weekly online meetings later, after hard work, lots of sweat and much fun, the core team (Zane Hartmane, Madara Zelčāne, Jeļena Solovjova, Raitis Linde, Līga Lētiņa, Krišjānis Určs) was ready to serve by bringing the first event to the community.
First event
It was January 28th, 2021, when we had the first meetup of the year that was devoted to participatory design. We had two passionate design leaders from the industry — Irina Ganeviča and Rostislav Roznoshchik who agreed to share their stories on the matter.
At first, we were concerned about how the first event will resonate with the community. After all, it was a remote event in the era of online meeting fatigue. We had set the limitation of 100 participants in Eventbrite (due to Zoom's limitation). And we were happy to see that all were taken with more than 100 enthusiasts being on the waiting list.
How can you be involved?
We hope to bring more reasons to meet this year (stay tuned to our Facebook page). At the moment we are planning 6 get-together events, 3 workshops, a design industry survey in Latvia, and a Slack community.
If you are up to be involved in the UX UI Riga design community, here is how:
- Follow UX UI Riga on Facebook for updates
- Apply at uxui.riga@gmail.com as a speaker
- Join the Slack community
- Follow or contribute to our blog (our community speaks Latvian, English, and Russian)
Spread the word to whoever is interested in making an impact, together, on digital service experience in Riga and beyond.
We believe that by growing the social capital we become a stronger, more resilient, and happier society. Let's contribute each in our own unique way.
See you around! 👋
