I could put a few of the many pictures I took during the conference or during the time before and after, but non of them can express my thoughts and my learnings I had as well as the thoughts I will try to put down now:
Many impressions and a lot of knowledge is for sure what I take away from the talks and the over all experience of the OFFF festival in Barcelona. But while many things will go into my subconscious library of information and experiences, a few things will definitely be stuck in my head for a while and – to follow up on the analogy – will be presented at the window front so people can profit from them as well.
Something I definitely will remember and keep in mind for a long time is the amount of practice it takes to reach your goals, but the practice that is necessary isn’t only to become proficient but mainly to discover what one really wants to do and what they want to express with their work. It isn’t the work we get hired for or we do in classes – sure, we learn a lot from those projects, but the work where you can run wild and try out weird stuff is where we actually find something unique that makes our work valuable. I will definitely try to explore more and work on the weird stuff that people might not see purpose in right away but that will eventually become something where people look at it and go “wow, I wish I would come up with something like that”. If I achieve a point where people think like that when looking at what I created I can call myself successful.
Another important note I take away thanks to Carla Molin is that you can be proud of any project you do. No matter how low level or small it might seem, as long as you learn something in the process it was worth it for sure. Also, while the big projects are for sure impressive, the small projects are worth just the same as it is easy to get lost in big projects that might never be finished – especially if I am working on those projects alone. It has happened a lot in the past that I have had great ideas where I had a great start into the design and development but lost myself half way in because I lost interest or motivation in the project.
While those two main take aways are positive inputs I also want to focus on one of the negative things I noticed at the OFFF conference. Of course it is to keep in mind that the talks I watched are mostly more on the technical side, but I still want to point out that in general the majority of the speakers were male and at least 40, if not a lot older. It is out of discussion that those speakers definitely have proven to be worth of presenting their work it felt a little discouraging to see little to no people I could relate to as a 22 year old female designer who wants to work with code as well. I would have loved to see more women in this field to see that they do exist and are seen in this male dominated area.
I definitely have a lot of inspiration and motivation for new projects and already started working on a few of them right away after the trip. Hopefully, trips like that will not be an exception and I will be able to go on trips like that in the future again!
