How it all started
Hi, my name is Bruno, and I'm a designer with an issue.
I was poorly trained in college. I learned most of what I know from the internet out of free content, videos, forums, and guides for dummies. Yet, I grew into an industry that always felt quite exclusive.
For years, I was told that to be a designer or to practice "proper" design (whatever that is), you had to be: a Professional user of Adobe tools, proficient in swiss grids, dabble in illustration, know your iconography... and this might be what many others like me have learned that being a designer was.
But here's the thing. I've always felt that design could be much more than the tools we use and the rules we learn. So I started venturing with new tools, fewer rules. Yet more considerations like accessibility and inclusivity of all others that once were not part of my design process. Still, I was mostly working on my own and, at that time, in a growing company with more and more people requesting more and more services from my team.
Eventually, one day, I had a choice: either keep believing that we, the designers, are the few chosen ones and kept all the workload for us, or figure out how to bring more people into the design process and enable them to be proficient in design tools and frameworks.
At this point, I learned that "Design Tools" is really a broad term, as any tool can be used for design. Also, that "Designers" is quite a loose definition. Our roles have shifted and adjusted, more than I could count, for the last few decades, and many people from many different backgrounds are now new types of designers. So the conclusion was simple: if any tool can be a design tool, and any person could become a designer or part of the design process, then... well, Design is for Everyone!
Armed with my conviction I set out to learn more about what this could mean. I started reading more (and belive me, I'm not an attentive reader) consume more information about open source and open design, what type of tools could do "design work" and what type of work that was, but also how we could subvert the original goal of said tools to extend what they can do for these new designers.
That lead me to create and deliver a talk for the Interaction Design Foundation Lisbon chapter, and that's where I ended up gaining the courage to create this project.
Now I'm looking to meet more people from all around the globe that match my new description of designer, aka Everyone. Using a podcast as an excuse to learn, I want to have relevant conversations, and share the message around this thing called Design, that could benefit more than just a selected few. It's due to proper democratization.
