Design Interest: Design Mash!

DesignInterest is the North East’s monthly design meet-up – we’ve got a brilliant community of designers in the region and the key aim of the group is to bring everyone together in a more social context, so we can all get to know each other and learn from each other. The previous meetings have followed a format of a design showcase, two or three lightening talks (I did one about A Better User Interface Process) and then finishing up with attendee’s bringing in their work for feedback and critique. At the winter social we brainstormed the idea of doing a more task-based meeting, where we’d be working groups to come up with solutions to a brief.

Myself and James each put together a brief for the two teams. My brief was based around a hypothetical conference, based on forging more physical emotional relationships with design, whilst James’ brief was about helping traditional news outlets to embrace digital publishing. Each brief had three tasks – the tasks for each brief ranged from brainstorming design ideas to solving problems with our existing tools. We wanted to encourage radical thinking and lots of discussion, so no laptops and only paper and pens!

Notes from Team C (photo from Vicky Teinaki)

Team ‘Conference’ came up with a concept to host a ‘Design Picnic’, with an informal setup / picnic theme – something that reflect the more emotional relationships people would have with other delegates and speakers by sharing more and sitting openly together, as well as there being some serious chat about tea towels, scones and jam. My favourite task from this brief was to design a meeting space to encourage meaningful conversations between delegates, which sparked a lot of interesting chat about different people’s comfort zones – we were split between wanting to use an app to locate people in your proximity, or simply having a visual indicator (we kept going back to balloons…) on your person to show you were up for a chat

Team N's Notes (photo from Vicky Teinaki)

The ‘News’ team came up with some fantastic solutions to their brief. – the tasks were based around creating an alternative online experience for reading and discussing news. I especially loved the task about bringing in a publishing houses’ extensive archive and history into the online browsing experience. The idea was to use the user’s location and allow them to go back in time and discover articles from their local area. As a bit of a history nerd, this idea really struck me as something I’d actively use – so someone, build it! ;)

There were some seriously well-thought out responses and ideas with just 20 minutes per task, so all credit goes to our teams for their brilliant (and sometimes crazy) ideas. I personally loved the format, it was a lot more informative, inspiring and useful to me to bounce ideas off other designers and spend an evening coming up with cool stuff with no real restrictions.

I’d like to thank everyone for coming along, and we’d absolutely love your feedback about the night (good or bad!), as we’re hopefully going to do the same again sometime.

If you missed out, keep an eye on the @DesignInterest twitters for announcements about our next event, or if you have an suggestions about events / talks we should run, please get in touch. We’re all about collaboration so ideas are all very welcome.