Conferences are a great experience, if you know what you want to get out of it. For me the reasons vary from conference to conference. In a Design conference in India, where the audience is limited, one has to be selective to know which conference to attend. I have attended and spoken at DesignUp, UXIndia and IndiaHCI in the past few years.
How to make your conference experience Awesome?
For me personally I realise that the talks (new thought leadership, new knowledge accumulated) contribute to only 30% of the conference experience. 10% would be from the workshops / masterclass (learning something new), 30% would be from meeting the old and new folks, getting a chance to network with people, (re)establishing connections. The rest 30% I just leave to serendipity / post conference parties / meet-ups. This could be something new, something did not expect! This also helps me to ensure that my overall conference experience is rewarding, if my expectations do not match with the talks only.
It’s been close to a month since we came back from the DesignUp 2019 conference in Bangalore. The after effects of the conference lasted long into multiple weeks, starting from the 14th BeerUX meet up in Bangalore to culminating in the DesignUp Stories sharing sessions at our 1mg office. Overall it was a great experience. Hopefully I get to attend it next year as well.
Personalising your conference experience
One of the things I do before attending any conference is to look at the speakers profile, the workshops on offer. I also check within my circles of trust to know who is attending. Six of us including myself attended this year’s DesignUp. As a Design leader it was also important to ensure that the team spread themselves across different workshops. So, well before the conference, we had the team members look through the list of workshops and conference schedule. I made some recommendations on the workshop they should be attending as it aligned with their growth and development as a designer. As a design leader one is aware of quite a few other people’s work / career and one can make a recommendation to the team members on whose talk to attend.
Post the workshop, back at office we did a meet up internally sharing our learnings from the conference with the entire design team at 1mg. If one is attending the conference as a team, it becomes important to do these sessions, as it allows others to catch up on things they have missed out upon.
Mridu shared her learnings from the Jon Kolko’s workshop. Bhavik shared his learnings from Shandar Junaid’s Adobe Xd workshop on Voice Interfaces, Avishek and Amit shared their insights from ‘Advanced Simplicity’ workshop by Giles Colborne. Purba shared her learnings from the workshop she attended too. I shared my learnings from Param Venkataraman’s talk and learnings from Dave Malouf’s ‘Practical Design Operations: Amplify the Value of Your Design Practice’ workshop.
One of the things I set forth to do when I joined 1mg was to create a culture of learning. This is from peers, attending conferences, meet-ups, and also sharing of articles and reference materials that contributes to the learning of the group overall. To facilitate that we have a Design Library in-house too (more on that later).
My quota of conference inspiration
Amongst the talks that really inspired me this year were by the following (in no particular order).
- Jon Kolko- His talk Creative Clarity talked about how we define and view Creativity
- Alysha Naples – a beautiful reflective talk on being a designer. (Slides here)
- Jack Morgan – The amazing mission of Duolingo.
- Hardik Pandya – His amazing talk (with a great sense of humour) on Design Documentation was perhaps the most well received talk of the conference. (Slides here)
- Dave Malouf – Design Ops is really helpful when we have a design team that is scaling. Amongst the things that this covers, from hiring to culture to interactions with different stakeholders to setting roadmaps.
- Param Venkataraman’s talk I could relate a lot as an epitome of what a designer’s journey would be from an Individual contributor to a Chief Design Officer; the most an individual designer could aspire for.
- Payal Arora’s talk on the Next Billion Users and our approach with the 5F framework to designing for them.
On a personal front, I was really looking forward to the DesignUp this year, since my standing ovation talk from last year. It was good to meet so many folks this time who had attended my talk last year. There was a Japanese journalist who had attended my talk last year, and remembered the work of Happy Horizons Trust. It was immensely humbling to have Jay speak about HHT on stage at DesignUp 19.
The conference was larger this time with more attendees and its crazy to imagine the effort that goes into pulling off something like this year on year. Huge shoutout to the entire Design Up team lead by Jay and Narayan and the whole team of volunteers!
Looking forward to the videos when it comes out to remember and reflect more.
Cheers to more pleasant memories.
#design #conferences #india #DUp19