Technology Takes You Somewhere
July 29th, 2010Look out all designers and developers: Gen Z girls are tech savvy and ready to step up to the plate! At least that’s what a day at the Technology Takes You Anywhere summit where Reading Room Brisbane hosted a workshop seemed to suggest. Girls today no longer need to fear the social stigmas attached with being a geek as those born into the digital age pretty much had no choice but to embrace it. The summit is an annual event aimed at increasing girls’ interest in technology and their confidence with using it. Through these events, girls will be exposed to a range of different technologies and female role models who work successfully in the ICT industry. Girls will also discover the diverse range of challenging and rewarding pathways that exist within the industry.
We held a digital design workshop for groups of girls in their tweens and the skills they brought to the table would make most tech savvy individuals cringe with inadequacy! Our presence seemed like a natural step for an organization where the myth of males dominating a tech based business are debunked entirely with significant leadership positions held by a multitude of talented and very switched on members of the female web industries here in Oz and the UK markets.Our new designer Suzanne Conkas delivered some brilliant templates complete with a web browser screen grab to assemble the layout within and another page of wireframe elements to use in the process. Worries about whether the task of copying & pasting would prove too challenging completely eroded as we were grilled with questions like “why aren’t we using Photoshop?” and “how come I can’t make this page go live?”.
Once we assured them that the next time they’d get to do actual web design our Australian CEO, Sarah Vick, introduced each group to our organization; the roles that women lead in and the types of jobs that are needed for this industry. Afterwards we had them choose a favourite topic for their websites, develop a user group, establish the user’s needs and finally sketch up some wireframes prior to launching into the design work. Unfortunately our example slides showed what we thought were typical topics of interest for this demographic and as soon as they saw the Bieber’s lack of a hairline all bets were off for sites about cute animals, families and world peace.
Providing them with the creative commons shared flickr search engine compfight.com they went to town downloading, copying & pasting and generally getting their geek on over topics ranging from strange girlish sounding boy singers with no visible foreheads to the love of the great Aussie pie. The results were surprising and more surprising was the after lunch group who almost needed the riot squad to disperse them once the bribery lollies were brought out for the Q & A session – close call but we all survived finger tips intact! All in all it was truly eye opening to see how dialled in the kids of today are regarding all things tech and great to see that the future of this industry will never be a boys club again.












