I’ve mentored for many years and always welcome opportunities to do so. I believe it helps the established designer as much as the newer designer, and should always be approached as a collaboration rather than a “lesson”. I have taken on mentees (I know it feels odd but that IS the term for the mentored person) both as a part of my role as well as volunteering for the several IxDA Sydney mentoring and Portfolio review sessions described below. I have recently joined ADP and also a member of Leapfrog Studio.
Mentoring
Lead UX
As a Lead UX, as well as some Senior UX positions, part of my role is to mentor other designers, and inform other designers and colleagues on what UX is and how best to approach UX tasks. As a Lead I made sure my crew was supported and empowered. I created a weekly UX club at ADHA so that we could share knowledge, techniques and tools for common development. Since 2015 I encouraged and arranged for the team to attend local events.
Community building
The seeds of community building was when I started the London Web Standards group in 2006. It was a small community that I founded but after I left became a significant group that has an annual conference.
When I was preparing to migrate to Sydney in 2008 I made friends with the Webblast organisers to expand it to regular cross-functional social events, translating into quarterly social events. I learned a great deal about sponsorship and the logistics of an evening event.
IxDA Sydney Local Leader
In Dec 2011 I attended the first IxDA Sydney event organised by Jay Rogers and others, hosted by Atlassian, with the aim of supporting a local design community, leveraging the goals of the global IxDA member-led organisation. IxDA supports Local Chapters creating their own communities and Sydney was ready for a local chapter. IxDA Sydney at the time was geared towards 3 threads Presentations, workshops, supporting not-for-profits through design.I helped organise the quarterly presentation evenings and the Mentoring program. I became a Local Leader in 2012.
By 2013 I was co-leading the community with Katja Forbes, supported by several secondary volunteers. Our main events were presentations and mentoring. We increased frequency to monthly and I managed the presenters and outreach while Katja managed the workshops. By 2016 we were running 12-14 engagements a year, including international speakers, local and remote workshops, pro bono services and a growing mentoring program.
We began recording the presentations and I created a domain, website and email addresses so we had a full digital footprint. At last count the YouTube channel has 85 videos of presentations. We also started asking international speakers who were coming to Sydney for conferences like UX Australia and Web Directions to come to our community to present anything that was not their conference presentation.
In 2016 I created a “mega meetup” aligned with the annual UXAustralia conference in Sydney. While UXAu was scheduled as 4 day conference we solicited the international presenters to join us for an evening event, leveraging their presence. This wasn’t a repeat of the conference but an organic evening building on the confluence of 4 or 5 of the presenters open for a creative evening. I pulled together other meetups like Sydney Design Thinking, CCX, EUX and UX Book Club to draw as wide a crowd as possible, reaching up to 145 attendees for a full evening.
In 2017 I introduced the portfolio review program. The basic concept was to enlist up to a dozen hiring managers and solicit people to bring their portfolios for review during a 20 minute session. This added up to 50 reviews conducted for free per evening.
In 2018 Katja joined the global IxDA board so I took over as sole Local Leader of the group of volunteers to organise events, programs and presentations. Vera Chan, Susan Wolfe, and others were pivotal in making these events successful. I had acquired serious sponsors like CommBank and Macquarie Bank, local recruiters and Several design businesses as hosts.
In Jan 2020 we had enough surplus to consider creating a not for profit and reduce our need for sponsors and be more independent. We had also created so many relationships across education, industry and other design communities in sydney that we were well placed to be a significant leader in the design community. I had been pestering the global IxDA board that there should be an Oceania/Asia conference in addition to the North America/Europe offerings. COVID put a halt to those plans.
During COVID, we ran several online events, mostly mentoring and portfolio reviews, but since we were aware people were already online for work we kept them sparse. We kept our community alive and active during that time when we could not meet in person.
In 2022 we created a podcast to support the mentoring program.
By early 2022 I’d had enough, after 11 years and over 160 engagements The campaigns we ran to bring more people into the team to foster new ideas and work were bearing fruit. New blood and new ideas, like the mentor podcasts assured me the community would continue. So I backed out and left the new team to lead new ideas.
In late 2022 the global board opened up the availability for host cities for interaction 24 (finally, after all my pestering!) and the submission team (not me!) put together a solid, successful bid, leveraging all the IxDA Sydney relationships. Sadly, IxDA global collapsed before interaction 24 could proceed and 2024 was the end of IxDASydney, which parted ways with IxDA global.
However. The relationships IxDA Sydney made between Dec 2011 and November 2023 are strong and extensive and I thank every volunteer who supported, whatever way you chose to do. You had a hand in building the IxDA Sydney community so much that we were constantly considered IxDA, not just one of the 180 IxDA communities, but the core IxDA.
I am proud of my contribution to IxDASydney and honoured to meet so many great designers, locally and internationally, both well known and new to the game, keen to be a part of the community we built together.
