What are Design Meetups?
Design Meetups are internally organised meetups hosted weekly for the CommBank digital design team. Our Mission: "To spread the fire of creativity".
Meetups ranged from external speakers, topical sessions by our agency partners, practical craft workshops, design practice explorations (e.g. What is Service Staging in Service Design?) and opportunities for our team members to share their stories.
Why did I join the team?
Culture! When people speak highly of their workplace, “good culture” is often a huge factor. What makes up that good culture? The people, perks like free food or an inspiring environment? These help build a culture that makes us want to come to work. This is what the meetups brings.
I believed the design meetups had the potential to be a significant pillar of the “good culture” of CommBank’s digital team. The meetups brought people together, engaged them on a broad range of topics and added a distinct pop to everyone's Friday afternoon.
My contribution
Make it work: I contributed to the backlog of speakers and sessions by reaching out externally as well as organising custom sessions. For example, we had a "Design the Vote" week aligned with the elections. We broke down the websites and branding of major parties and attempted to reverse engineer their design decisions through empathy.
Keep it fun: We'd send weekly reminder emails about our Friday sessions and if I can say so myself I'm in hot contention for the title of CommBank GIF Master for establishing the tradition of including gifs in our emails. Humour goes a long way in a large corporation still using Outlook (Slack, you're so far away it hurts).