HUSTLE is about sharing thoughts and ideas for designing user interfaces for digital products. It’s about growing the greater knowledge and challenging preconceptions. It’s about analysing current trends and bringing them to light for the community to make their own decisions.
The business world teaches us to learn the tricks of the trade, and use them to beat the competition and self-prosper. But as web professionals, we have learnt first hand the consequences of proprietary thinking. It leads to non-compatible frameworks and limitations on our ideas. We know that if we do not build a connected, opensource web, the web will never grow to it’s potential.
The same exists for us, the architects of tomorrows web. If our processes, tools, methods and objectives are not derivative of a common thread of thought, we will only continue to grow in separate directions. Our knowledge, and the knowledge we share with our understudies, will be disjointed and inconsistent.
Why Belfast?
Well, for a start it’s where we live. But more importantly, we believe we have the perfect storm in Northern Ireland. We are small enough to have a strong community of creatives working at the cutting edge of design and technology. Add to this excellent IT infrastructure, world-class education, global companies laying their roots due to our proximity to the UK, Europe and the world.
Besides all that however we believe that we have an awesome creative culture. We are fearless. We have nothing to lose and everything to prove. We already have the attention of the rest of the world through fantastic Northern Irish conferences such as Build and BreakConf.
Why now?
Creative and UX as a profession has gathered enormous momentum. It only takes a few minutes on LinkedIn to see that creatives are in higher demand than ever before. With so much demand, we are at risk of seeing ill-prepared designers entering into roles, and letting us down as a body of professionals. Whether it’s learning to work in a process driven environment, or in a company where design and creative are nowhere to be seen in their mission statement. It’s tough out there, and we need to help each other, in order to save ourselves.
What to talk about?
Digital. That’s a pretty big list, but we don’t want to be held to a definitive list right now. However, we do want there to be a maturity to our talks, this is not web design 101, but an invitation to creative professionals who know the parlance of business and the challenges and solutions that come with it. We want to tap into and explore those solutions.
Target audience?
We’re aiming this primarily:
• Web/UI designers
• UX consultants
But also for curious…
• Web developers and digital makers
• Print and brand designers
• Video makers
• Animators
• Illustrators
• Game designers
• Creative project managers
We hope you will join us in this mission and help make our profession stronger, so we can exist as better professionals within it.
