Hull Digital Live

Today has been the most amazing fountain of knowledge for me with regards my project, my possible career path and my knowledge of life in general.

Today I attended Hull’s second digital conference Hull Digital Live 2010, I attended last year’s inaugural event which was incredible but this year’s event surpassed my expectations.

As I am beginning my design career it is very important to me to learn as much as I can and I believe that you can learn a lot from not only your experiences but also the experiences of others people who have been there and done it so to speak or are still doing it, leading the way for beginners like myself.

I was not sure what to expect at the start of the day as I had failed to research the speakers apart from Brendan Dawes whose reputation I was already aware of.

Although all of the speakers were very interesting I particularly enjoyed the talks by Matt Brown, Sarah Parmenter and Brendan Dawes as they seemed to be most appropriate to me.

Matt Brown is a designer that has worked upon a number of different projects that seem to vary vastly in terms of style, genre and materials. This was extremely interesting to me as I have been worrying about what I am going to do when I finish university? For those of you who are reading this and have no knowledge about me and who I am or what I do here’s the background, I am a nightclub DJ by trade and have been since the age of fourteen, I have worked all across the north of England in bars and clubs entertaining people with various genres and styles of music. This is about as far away as possible from what I imagine a real job (as my mum would call it) to be. I have never had a typical office job or any form of day job at all, so I am worried about the changes I am making to my career path. I don’t see myself sat in front of a computer all day, every day doing the same monotonous tasks, I need challenges, changes and above all else an element of fun and enjoyment or maybe job satisfaction. I saw through Matt’s career that there are opportunities out there to be creative in numerous ways, I still don’t quite know how to find them or what job titles or roles I should be applying for but I now know that there are roles that I can look for and there is nothing wrong with changing roles or moving on to find the opportunities that are out there.

Sarah Parmenter’s talk was interesting for a number of different reasons; Sarah owns her own design studio called You Know Who, her field of expertise is User Interface Design of Websites, iPhone and iPad applications. This is the area where most of my focus in terms of my study has been, Sarah’s talk focussed mainly on iPhone and iPad application design. Although I do not own any form of Apple device, I still found there were lots of interesting information that I could use especially for this project. Mobile Interface design whether it be for iPhone, Android or any of the other platforms available has many similar principles although devices may change certain elements, the idea of creating an interface that is easy to use stays the same. I also liked her examples of how she produced wireframes and walkthroughs for presentation to clients and I will be implementing some of that in my work. I was intrigued though by Sarah’s reaction in the question and answers section at the end her presentation, when I asked her if she only designed for the apple platforms especially at the moment with the coming of Android. It was not only her reaction that intrigued me but the reaction of by far the majority of people attending the conference, in fact for a minute I felt like a vampire in a room of people holding crucifixes. Sarah said that she only designs for apples devices and that she feels that is the right move for her and her success so far proves this. To an extent I believe she is right, she is the master of her craft, a craft that at the moment is very much in vogue but it is my experience in my own non designing career that you should never dismiss any potential future avenues as you never know what may happen in the future.

The reaction of the crowd was also interesting, this was also followed up when John Moss asked the attendees how many people used an iPhone and I approximate at least 80% where iPhone users in fact I’ve never seen so many iPads as there was in that room, it suffices to say that Apple definitely had that crowd wrapped around its little finger. Apple create wonderful pieces of technology that work well and look even better and they may have set the standard in terms of mobile devices in recent years but there is more to life than the iPhone. It is my belief that cross platform apps is the way forward and the only way to do that at the moment is to develop different versions of apps for different platforms but the design principles are the same never the less, whether its Android, iPhone or any other device, the application of good interaction design principles will lead you towards great apps that help people, but that might actually be the problem, the needs of users may not be the number one consideration, maybe the needs of consumers is the focus people who will pay for apps, it is a business after all and the iPhone is the current top Smartphone in the UK, it makes good business sense to offer services to the largest share of the market but does that mean you should ignore the non iPhone users and just hope they will one day see sense and buy an iPhone?

From a designers point of view maybe it is better to be a master of one platform than a Jack of all platforms but to me the platform could almost be irrelevant as the interface design should follow principles that are relevant to all devices and only moderate design changes would need to be made or is this my own naivety as a designer at the beginning of my career?

Sarah Parmenter is a top industry professional who produces high quality pieces of design and I learnt a lot from her presentation, although I am currently creating my application on the Android platform the parallels were apparent to me and I hope that I can use the knowledge she passed on within my own work.

Brendan Dawes was the speaker I was most looking forward to see and his presentation did not disappoint, he was as unorthodox as I imagined and that is good thing not a criticism, he explained why he does what he does and why he does it that particular way, for anybody reading this who does not know Brendan’s work I recommend his book Anologue In Digital Out. Brendan creates experiences that are different, memorable for their uniqueness and possibly quirkiness, I have a conflicted opinion of Brendan’s work, I sometimes think his work is hard to use from a usability point of view and to me it sometimes does not inspire repeated use, in some cases it may frustrate users, so I expressed this to him in the Q & A session after his talk, I explained that I believe his work to be amazingly creative and absolute genius whilst at the same time possibly hard to use and in some cases could be considered to be a bit wacky, like the work of a mad scientist let loose to create without rules. But I could not see how this is relevant in a world where business and companies demand return on investment for the projects he produces, how does his business get work and survive? He explained at first he had to produce normal projects and the wackiness was like his own experiments but these experiments became popular and provided him with notoriety with companies approaching him to produce projects that were unconventional and in time he reached a point where his unconventional work was so popular that he did not need the other work and in fact was in a position to turn away projects that did not interest him. Brendan seemed to be a good example of turning your passion into a way of sustaining a good living through his work and his work is something he seemed very passionate about. I very much enjoyed Brendan’s talk and I found him as a person to be very inspirational.

There seemed to be a theme of ”chasing your dreams” and the passion displayed by each speaker for their specialist arrears was infectious to say the least, this was good to see as I often worry that my passion for what I do is a negative aspect, I am very passionate about what I do, this sometimes I feel can be a hindrance in my work as I often question the status quo in order to find understanding and unfortunately it seems to come across sometimes as aggression but to me it is important to understand, questioning and disagreeing at times creates re-assessment, discussion ideas and possibly or hopefully innovation.

I would like to thank Jon Moss for putting together an amazing conference that has inspired me in so many ways, I would also like to thank the speakers who passed on their knowledge and possibly a little piece of their souls and I would also like to thank Hull School of Art and Design for giving me the opportunity to attend such an amazing learning experience.