Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

We’re counting down to Direction, our big end of year conference, the 10th anniversary of our very first event. For this year we’ve made some changes (while keeping to the essence of the event thousands of attendees over the last decade have found so engaging and valuable). We’d love you to join us, as we set sail for the next exciting decade.

Long-time (and even more recent) attendees of Web Directions will probably have noticed a few changes across all the various activities we run.

But none is bigger than the (r)evolution of our major annual event, which for the last decade since it started in 2006 has been known as Web Directions.

Way back then, our focus was almost entirely on Web design and our audience was that many-hatted expert of all things Web, from HTML and CSS to visual design, usability and accessibility, content, SEO and much more besides.

But just as the Web, and the community of professionals around this core technology have changed profoundly in the last decade, we’ve changed too. We added tracks to help those specialising in specific areas of practice develop their knowledge and skills. And we found, over time, that it was the ideas that ran across specialisations that particularly engaged and energised our audience.

Over the decade, and particularly in recent years, we’ve developed new conferences focusing on specific areas of practice, like Code for front-end engineering, Respond for web and interaction design, and most recently this year Transform, focusing on the revolution occurring around the world in Government Services Delivery. All these will continue — and, indeed, grow — into the future.

As we turned toward the second decade of Web Directions, we spent a lot of time (and I mean a lot) thinking about the role of our “big” event. From its name (we’ve felt for a while now the word “Web” is limited in its reach and appeal, backed up by emails from people who’ve told us their boss won’t send them to a “Web Design” conference), to how many tracks it would comprise, to the overall focus of the event.

And so, after a lot of consideration, and many conversations with people close to the events,  was (re)born — Direction.

The name both links to our past and looks to the future. The choice of the singular “Direction” over the plural “Directions” was very deliberate, and aims to capture the key mission of the event. When we know where we want to go, we ask for directions. But on the bigger journeys of our life, both personal and professional, there is no single destination, no one specific place we are looking to go. Rather, there’s an overall direction in which we are headed. And it’s that choice of direction that this event is all about. This idea is for me captured poignantly in Robert Frost’s perhaps too-often quoted poem “The Road Not Taken”

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Each of us likely has a story of paths taken and not: junctures in our lives, personal and professional. Those of us who work in and on the Web, and at the intersection of design and technology, almost certainly did not follow the sorts of paths associated with more traditional professions and careers. Our ‘field’ (a term too constrained to describe the landscape we inhabit) continues to evolve (we continue to evolve it). The novel ideas and skills and techniques we learned last year become “table stakes”, even obsolete – replaced, superseded or subsumed by what comes next. And keeping up is both exciting and challenging. This restlessness almost defines our field.

At the heart of our events (and everything else we’ve done over the last decade and more, and at the heart of my own writing, speaking, and even the software I’ve written over the last 20 years) has been the effort to make sense of where we are, and where we are going. I think this is in no small part why such ground breaking, and diverse ideas as OOCSS (first introduced to the world by a then little known Nicole Sullivan at Web Directions North in 2009) and “The New Aesthetic” (an idea originally outlined by James Bridle at Web Directions South 2012), alongside now world renowned speakers who first spoke at our events, have originated at our conferences. We spend a significant part of our lives here thinking about these divergent roads, and finding ways to introduce them to our audience.

And it’s this that’s the animating focus of Direction. Not a prescriptive “here are the things you should be doing”, not directions to get you from A to B, but ideas about which direction to take, about where our field at the intersection of design, the Web and technology seems to be going.

Over the next two months, as we lead up to the 10th anniversary of our first event, and the first Direction conference (which will also be very familiar in many ways from previous Web Directions you’ve been to) I’ll be going into more detail about the sessions we’ve programmed, and my thinking behind what interested me about the ideas, and the experts delivering them, and how all this fits into the broader themes and patterns and trends I see emerging in our field.

But if there’s a theme, among others that will emerge in the coming weeks and at the conference, it’s that we don’t face that fork in the road just once in our careers in this field: we face these choices, in large ways and small, over and over.

And when we choose a path, it’s also to the exclusion of the road not taken, so these choices really do matter, they shape our lives, sometimes a little, and sometimes much more.

Which is an enormous privilege that we have – in many other fields, the choices and opportunities are far more constrained.

But there’s no doubt it can be challenging to face this constant change, the incessant requirement to keep up with currents of practice, with technologies and ideas.

The phrase “I’m too old for this” passes my lips perhaps bit too frequently. But then I look to the work emerging where design and technology meet, on the Web, with physical objects, in the built environment, and the excitement overcomes my anxiety, as I’m sure it does for you. And ironically, it keeps me young.

Direction is all about that excitement, helping fuel it, through amazing presentations, and experiences outside the theatre, and channel it toward what comes next.

I can’t wait for it to come around, and to share it with you.