Heart & Sole Networking Event

Finally have got round to writing up my thoughts about the inaugural networking event by Heart & Sole on the 28th January 2011 at the Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth, bringing together Webdesign and Webdevelopment students and professionals in the UK's southeast region.

It was a most resounding success, which genuinely astonished me, having not had much contact with this network before - apart from one minor annoyance of having to wait in the freezing cold wind to be let in at 7pm on the dot (which was clearly a condition by the events company), the evening was extremely well organised and seemed to run without a glitch. The venue added to the atmosphere, and the dynamic and enthusiastic audience and speakers made for a pretty funky event, really. It certainly made a change from the kind of academic conferences I normally attend, and could certainly measure up to compare to some of the glitzy events of the media and technology world in bigger cities.

The talks were separated into two strands, and I had decided to attend Rob Hawkes' (Bournemouth University student) talk about HTML 5 canvas and John O'Nolan's (Wordpress designer) talk about User Interface Design at Wordpress. Both speakers have books in preparation. More than this though, I was impressed how well prepared, engaged and confident these fairly young speakers were in their presentations. The other talks were by Anna Debenham and Syd Lawrence, as well as some talks by sponsor representatives, Neil Dennis from Strawberrysoup and Darren Waddell from Abacus e-media - which all seemed to receive equally positive feedback.

The content overall seems to be very practice orientated and 'of-the-moment' -i.e., here we found people getting together, who wanted to talk to each other and learn how to 'get on with it'. In future, there may be some room for reflection on the field/discipline in general, and perhaps a format for interactive debate.

For example, I would be interested in discussing the question of the relationship between webdesign and webdevelopment - in other words, the relationship between the webdesign(er) and webdevelop(er). Students preparing for their career in the digital media world are often interested in how to decide where to position themselves, which aspects and skills to emphasise -i.e. most pressing: how much coding knowledge does one need? I'm sure there is more than one answer to this, and probably a lot of interesting case studies amongst the members of Heart & Sole.

In light of this, personally I would also like to discuss what the members of the Heart & Sole network consider essential skills for the digital media graduate / postgraduate to have. Especially interesting here are not necessarily just the specialist software packages / coding languages, but more the kind of transferable skills of independent working, self-directed learning, research ability (analysis, evaluation, synthesis), communication and presentation, critical thinking etc. University courses are often criticised for not being able to keep up with market-demands of progressing technology and therefore skills, which is probably a fair criticism. So what alternative benefits can a university education offer (i.e. the above transferrable skills, time, scope, reflection, motivation and community to learn)?


In the final talk of the evening, Christian Heilmann suggested for innovative developers working on pushing the boundaries of their practice to document their endeavours more methodically and consistently, so that the larger community can benefit from and build upon them. A point well made, and clearly resonated with the audience, evident in lively discussions and tweetings afterwards. It is a timely point, what I would like add is that to write about your practice is actually a skill that is not innate, it needs to be honed, and could be frustrating at first attempt. So in requesting people to document, we must also remember that this is not always as easy as writing a shopping list. Skills of the reflective practitioner are higher level skills, which mean you don't just document, but are also able to analyse and evaluate the meaningful things that happened during the process of making. At university (UoP), particularly here at the School of Art, Design & Media where I work, being able to reflect on and write about your practice is something we look for and try to facilitate. Obviously, most people can do it, but like with anything, you become better at it over time.
And in order to be useful to the community, the documentation of practice, process and outcomes should aim for highest quality. On that note: in curriculum design, one would consider the active part people play in learning (in this case your audience), which is perhaps why the ubiquitous 'do and don't' lists on design blogs are fairly inconsequential.

When I mentioned all this to Christian, his response was "well, there you have it, that could be another blog post already!" - so there we go :)