Workshops at ARTIFACT

After two intensive days of presentations, there was a day of workshops. With two options to pick from:

• Designer + Developer Collaboration Workflow, with Brad Frost and Dan Mall; or
• Design for Developers, with Sarah Drasner.

Both of them looked really interesting. As a developer liking design, the "Design for Developers" one looked really tempting... but my company was paying for the workshop -lucky me-, and they considered that "Designer + Developer Collaboration" would be more interesting for my role.

The Workshop

So, off I went to meet Brad and Dan in their workshop... and I must admit, it was an enlightening and entertaining activity.

Brad Frost and Dan Mall presenting during the workshop (photo by jaxatto)

I don't want to get much into detail of the content in itself (it's their workshop and part of their job, don't want to mess with it). But the day followed this general schedule

1. Presentations
2. Small exercice
3. Motivational video 😉
4. "Theory" section
5. Lunch break
6. Work with partners + "Tutorials"
7. Demos
8. Closing statements and farewells

We worked in pairs of developer-designer, in a small project to put into practice what we had just learned. We created the mini-site "Silly News" with the top daily news. It was fun.

It was also a stimulating experience considering that it is not how we work daily, cooperating in a more active and interactive way with the designer.

Takeaways

Jax summarizes on her tweet:

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The main takeaways of the workshop were:

• Stop thinking in terms of "Developers vs Designers".
• Deliver low fidelity first and fast iterate.
• Communicate: a conversation goes "further" than documentation.
• Designer support your developer (and viceversa).
• Start development since day one.
• Start flexible like clay, and solidify like glass as the project evolves.

Conclusion

This session marked the end of ARTIFACT 2019. A three-day event with many interesting presentations that lived up to the all-star lineup, and two enriching workshops.

I had a blast during these three days, and can't wait to be part of a conference like this again.