Developer Circles Lagos Design Workshop, as seen through the lens.
Sometimes I ask myself, what if I never stumbled upon this group, what if I was never a part of this community? Well, the magnitude of all I would have failed to experience would’ve been massive.
If there’s only one thing being part of the Developers Circles does to you, it would be the fact that it disrupts your knowledge base and throws you out of your comfort zone. Honestly, standing for something much larger than oneself never felt so good.
Unfortunately to you all, this piece is not going to be a good ol’ motivational write-up, I’m just going to go further to narrate the last event we held, thus creating a leveled playground for Designers in Tech to interact with Industry Experts, then I figured a little bit of drama at the beginning would help me hold attention through the rest this content.
Without further ado, and at the same time “furthering the ado” August 18th 2018 was the day the Facebook Developers Circle : Lagos Design Team held their maiden event tagged as a Design Workshop for entry level designers, for both mobile, web products.
August 18th wasn’t really the initial set date, the facilitators had planned for the 11th day of August to hold this, it just happened that the Nigeria’s First International Developer Conference : Concatenate.io was set to hold on that same day.
With us seeing the bigger picture and being the bigger person we moved our date forward, because you know (*Wink*) we didn’t want to end up stealing all their attendees (*Wink*). Well their event was a massive success and because of our thoughtfulness, ours was as well.
On our day, the weather did give us a light scare that it may discourage our attendees, well apparently it was just kidding, and everybody showed up. At least early enough for the event to begin in time.
So here’s Agboola Yemi Michael our very own co-lead taking ownership of the stage and engaging the audience up until the speakers were ready to dispense drops of knowledge.
Now the first speaker Christian Lasbery on UX Fundamentals, he pretty much hit the nail on the head on this one with his close to perfect analogies on how Design Empathy makes a better product. Those drops of knowledge really sunk in.
And here we have Gideon Oladimeji and Ehima Prince, still one of our own taking on the audience on a live design session on utilizing Adobe XD as a design and prototyping tool. The interest and attention paid was priceless.
Since everyone began looking so serious, it was then the right time for some comic relief and a Kahoot.it game session did just that for us. We had a little something for the winners, courtesy of Figma_Africa.
The day seemed to have gotten as interesting as it could ever be, until Egwu Sarah came before the audience to teach the Art of Product design from Ideation to Production, the interactivity and synergy was completely off the charts, everybody was literally anointed with enthusiasm.
The next session was a much rather interesting one that left everyone amazed as Barbara Mbanefo (Software Engineer and UI/UX Designer at Facebook) narrated her story from how as a developer she decided to learn design and thus, got offered employment from four of the worlds’ tech giants.
An incredible story I must say, in fact “amazed is an understatement”.
She did great in stressing the relevance of Design Thinking as to everyday life, and how one can open doors of opportunities for oneself by just being a designer.
The concluding session I must say was my favorite, all the synergy and enthusiasm still lasted to this point, and the session was owned by Namso Marshal Ukpanah or Design Honcho as he calls himself, a Design Lead at Hotels.ng and Design Advocate for Figma Africa.
Somehow how, he managed to aid the entire audience conquer the basics of the Figma design tool and design a multi-screen app prototype. Everybody didn’t just sit and watch, everybody designed.
Well at the end of it, with everybody’s’ face glistening with utter satisfaction, the rest of the energy was put to play as all started conversing with each-other with hugs, selfies and truck load of smiles.
This is basically my account as seen through my lens.
Communities like the Developer Circles and Figma Africa will continue to create avenues like this, much more and much better as have been done in past times, now we can only hope that those who have experienced the goodness of being a part of this, do not fail to testify.
This piece is still not a motivational write-up but I hope it inspired something, now go and testify.
