Last week my fellow students and I traveled to Barcelona to visit the OFFF Barcelona fair from March 23rd to 25th. It was a lot of fun to explore the fair and Barcelona together with my colleagues and to reflect on our experiences together. I gained some positive new experiences and insights.
The venue of the OFFF was the design Museum of Barcelona. It was very cool to see so many creative minds in one place. There were some interesting talks. Unfortunately some of them overlapped or were in smaller rooms that were quickly overcrowded. In the area of interaction design there were a couple of interesting talks which I personally found the most inspiring like the one by Jjosue Ibanez and Iregular. Some of these speakers gave insights into their working methods.
Joshua Davis, an American designer and technologist, for example, talked about the development of his current design style. He showed his very beginnings and that he tried a lot of things in his development process, many of which didn’t look good. He talked about how around 2010 he realized he was too stuck in the same patterns. So he decided to move out of his comfort zone and try something new. My take away from his talk was that you always have to stay in the uncomfortable to work creatively in new ways.
Another topic about which many speakers talked about was, of course, AI. Artificial intelligence is also a worrying topic for the creative industry, as there is the idea that AI could take over creative professions. Some speakers had similar opinions on this: we should not see AI as an adversary but use it and cooperate with it, this way we can expand our skills and stay up to date with the latest developments.
We also had the opportunity to attend workshops by ZetaFonts, an independent type foundry from Florence. The workshop was a really fun and exciting experience where we learned a lot about the emotional importance of fonts. At the end of the workshop, a font for Barcelona was created from all our sketches.
Even though there were some inspiring talks at the OFFF, there were still things to criticize about the fair. For one thing, there were far too few female speakers at this fair, which I found disturbing. Some talks were more like a portfolio presentation than inspirational or impulse giving. In my opinion, the talk we got from Marta Handenawer at the agency Domestic Data Streamer was one of the best, most educational and inspiring I have seen in Barcalona.
Links:
https://joshuadavis.com/
https://domesticstreamers.com
https://www.josueibanez.com/
https://www.instagram.com/zetafonts/
