Lightning - Stop Being Mythical
A talk by Simon Vansintjan
Stop it. Stop telling us to be things we’re not. Stop telling us to learn new skills, to specialize in new things.
We’re told to be unicorns or pegasus’s but our field is already mythical, incredibly diverse, hard to understand, and difficult to learn more about. Let’s try to focus on making things simpler, and take our existing skills a bit more seriously.
Let’s build on the community we already have to make life easier for the professionals in our field. Let’s focus on the skills they have - instead of giving them anxiety attacks about their lack of coding or design strategy knowledge - and how those skills fit into the bigger picture of User Experience. We are generalists, and we should be proud of that.
Simon Vansintjan
Simon is a user experience and prototyping consultant based in Brussels, Belgium, but probably somewhere else at the moment. He currently runs UX Weekly and has done work ranging from strategy for large telecom to small home-grown mobile apps.
He’s done extensive work as a creative technologist with the Portland-based mobile design and strategy firm Citizen, building interactive presentations and immersive multi-media exhibitions.
Before that, Simon spent a handful of years building apps for startups in Edinburgh. That was fun, but the weather wasn’t.
