Our first event was on 1 October 2011. Despite it being an unseasonably hot day with the beach beckoning, around 60 UX folk came along. They included (to our surprise) people who had flown in from overseas. The event was held at the old Cogapp office, near Churchill Square. Organised by Patrick, ably supported by Gavin Wye.
The after party ended up at the Earth and Stars, after we were squeezed out of our room at the Brighton Music Hall by drunk topless men (although not everybody minded that).
After the fun of the first one, we decided to do it all again. The second UX Camp Brighton was held on 8 December 2012. Around 70 UX professionals returned to the Cogapp office. Organised by Patrick on his own (which was a lot of work!).
The after party was at the Cask Pub (since closed) on Upper North Street, Brighton. No marauding men were to be seen at this one (well, maybe a couple).
The third time was a charm, as the saying goes, with around 80 attendees. We ran the event on 2 November 2013, the day after the UX Brighton 2013 conference. For this event, we relocated to the Clearleft office on Ship Street. Luke Hay, Tom Prior, Chris How and Tim Minor joined Patrick to share the work organising this event and subsequent ones. Mat Walker also helped out this year (as well as the 2016 and 2017 events). Highlights included enormous quiches, far too many bottles of cava and a massive charity donation to the Macular Society…
This was also the year the #uxquix found it’s home at UXCB, with Tim acting as our Quizmaster extraordinaire! Highlights include the virtually impossible Graphs round where contestants had to guess the subject of the graph with all the titles and axis information removed. The Graphs round did not return.
The after party was at the Las Vegas Bar, with its giant wooden hand and memorable prison-style toilets.
This was the first year we decided to hold a redux of 2013, where we invited speakers from some of the day’s most popular sessions to rerun their talks with a small audience. The speakers were Rob Pearson, Rob Boynes, Luis Abreu, Viviana Doctorovich, Ben Sauer and Chris How.
We held this smaller event on 14 January 2014, with a more low key after party at a nearby pub.
Our fourth main event was on 15 November 2014 at The Brighthelm Centre on North Road. The bigger venue allowed us to expand and we were delighted to welcome 140+ people on the day. We were grateful for help from our attendees to get the slightly dubious tech set-up to work on the day.
The after party was at the FunFair Club near the beach, with bangin’ reggae tunes and hot patties, with a hardy few revellers finishing up with German snuff at a Scandinavian bar.
As our previous redux had been a success, we decided to ask our session hosts to rerun a few of the audience’s favourite talks from the 2014 unconference. The speakers were Carlos Saba, Sophie Mitchell, Jeremy Rosenberg, Ellen de Vries and Chris How (again).
We held the 2014 redux on 13 January 2015, with a variety of folks from across the local UX community.
We decided to move the event to spring, so our fifth unconference was on 19 March 2016. We hit the road again, and moved to City College Brighton on Pelham Street. Over 150 people crammed into the venue, which was a tight squeeze.
Some memorable aspects of this event were the super slow coffee line and far too many flights of stairs. And this was the year that #uxquiz was sponsored by Luke Hay’s quiz Pringles™️ The after party was at The Eagle on Gloucester Road, where Luke disappointed to miss out on the tiny amount of sliced meat.
Our 2016 redux was on 14 June 2016. The speakers were Rob Pearson (again), Fiona MacNeill, Al Power and Chris How (again²).
Our audience for the redux events was steadily growing. We decided they were worthwhile continuing, particularly for people who were unable to attend the main event.
The sixth UX Camp Brighton was held on 25 March 2017 at The Skiff on Cheapside with over 100 attendees.
The winners of the final quiz round designed a device to check your hipster levels, and went home with a book prize each from O’Reilly. Two of our more recent additions to the organising team, Kate and Rob, remember this well as they were both on the winning team.
The after party was held at the Lord Nelson Inn on Trafalgar Street.
The redux events were in full flow at this point, with almost as many attendees as the main event. The 2017 redux was on 9 May 2017 at The Skiff, Cheapside.
The speakers were Peter Winchester, Rebecca Hugo, John Flitcroft and Kathy Neuss. We were chuffed to bits to welcome around 80 people to the event.
On 24 March 2018, for our seventh event, we headed back to The Skiff. We had 130 attendees, which was almost too many to squeeze up and down the stairs between each talk.
The activity round of our famous UX Quiz was a corker, with lots of crazy robots! The after party was at the Skiff too where Danny Hope tried to lock Patrick in the broom cupboard.
With so many attendees at the 2018 unconference, we had plenty of great talks to choose from for the 2018 redux. We held the event on 6 June 2018 at The Skiff, which had become a familiar home for our events.
Presenters were Rob Pearson (again²), Sophie Harper, Leo Barnes, Rebecca Hugo (again) and Chris How (again³).
Around 60 people joined us for the event and a few drinks afterwards.
UX Camp Brighton’s eighth event was back at The Skiff on 9 March 2019. Engineering works on the rail line to London impacted our attendance slightly, with around 100 people joining us on the day.
The quiz this time had a Brexit theme, with a spinning wheel of Theresa May! In the activity round folks created sketch notes from a UX video, which were ineptly (but kindly) judged by Patrick, Danny Hope and Davina Sirisena.
We felt so at home at The Skiff that we stayed there all evening, celebrating the birthday of Tom (one of our organisers) until the small hours.
For our 2019 redux on Thu 6 June 2019, we headed to 68 Middle Street and hosted around 40 people. Presenters were Alice Richmond, Charlotte Breton, Peter Winchester (again), Claire Durrant and Chris How (again⁴).
Our attendance numbers were hit by exceptionally warm weather and the small matter of an England football match (we lost again). Not our luckiest bit of scheduling!
The pandemic knocked us out of commission for 2 years but we came back with a bang in 2022. Our 9th event was on 26 March 2022, at the sparkling new Plus X Brighton co-working and events space on Lewes Rd.
As we were just coming out of pandemic restrictions, we reduced the ticket numbers to 60 to ensure everyone had the space they needed to feel safe.
In the activity round of the quiz, folks had to create a storyboard and ‘design the box’ for a service/product (sillier the better) to help users in a randomly drawn scenario.
A pile of us kicked it on to the Gladstone afterwards, to celebrate getting back together after the COVID hiatus. There we fertively ploughed our way through a mountain of leftover crisps and introduced Al Power and others to the delights of Patrick’s special drink invention, the Thunderclap™️.
We also moved the redux to a new home in 2022. We welcomed 40 attendees to PLATF9RM, North Rd on 26 May 2022.
Our speakers included Tehriem Asif, Alexander Baxevanis, Tajwar Aziz, Rob Pearson (again³).
This was our 10th main event (17 including all the reduxes) and was held on 15 April 2023, at PLATF9RM, Hove Town Hall.
We celebrated our anniversary in style with an after party at The Cricketers.
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