Nerding

Bi-week note edition because things have been spinning in all corners. For the first week in 10+ notes, my brain felt drained after 10 days of attentive classroom-ing, teaching and work. I’m learning to value my headspace more, and avoid over-committing, even if sometimes my calendar looks deceivingly open.

March is also an extra special month because it’s my birthday. Quarter century club in 3 days (aka St. Patrick’s Day)!

So far… in a nutshell

• Venturing into academia. I went to art school, so I was never research-trained beyond desk level and surveys (oops). Having access to a library again has introduced me a wealth of white papers, obscure databases, and publications — can’t wait to pick some serious brains.

• Attended some very, very interesting lectures. I'm still amazed by the quality of content and delivery in the program! Some of my favourites:

  • Sensorial design from the psychology of response/reaction/interpretation, delivered by ENT surgeon Dr. Mountain (a true U-shaped hybrid)

  • Service delivery in healthcare as 'performative art'. This completely challenged my thinking of healthcare = service. Dr. Kneebone directs the Centre of Performative Science between Imperial College and the Royal College of Music, at a school that draws from medicine, science, art and music.

    • I’ve been thinking a lot about the plane of U-shaped hybridism and transdisciplinary lately, and how I can diversify myself as an individual. It’s made me more receptive to learning the things I had always deemed myself bad at, i.e. STEM.

  • Design ergonomics and spanning this to digital, services, systems (making these interactions more 'comfortable')

  • De-anthropocentrisation of healthcare, and questioning the shift to patient-centricity. Must humans always be on the top of the ladder?

• 3-day research sprint where my team looked at the design of the speculum, and made some provocations on the fear of sexualisation in healthcare. What an amazing time to be a student, wow.

• Delivering a systems thinking workshop on my return to the Design Management cohort @ UAL

Run notes

Week 3 of my race training and I’ve just crossed the first peak of my longest distances, before I taper off for a week. Mentally I’m hyped, but physically I’m drained and praying for my joints everyday. I realise that whilst I love the hybrid format (boxing/F45/runs/resistance training), my recovery/sleep has been taking a huge hit. Going forwards, I’m going to drop the resistance days (!) to really focus on honing those runs. Calories up, cardio up, sleep hours hopefully up?!

Birthday

Birthdays are my favourite days (my own and my people’s). Every year, we get 1 out of 365 days to spoil ourselves, demand attention, be wished for, practice socially acceptable narcissism, take the day off work if we want, celebrate all week if we feel like it.

I’ve always loved birthdays, but it’s also meant I put a lot of pressure on myself to hold this day to perfection — even if the odds of March 17th being above average is no better than any other day. I think about all the birthdays I get to have (the milestones, 30th, 65th, 100th?). I think about the birthdays I did have, which in memory isn’t many, but a few of them I’ve been lucky enough to call the happiest days of my life.

This year, I’ve never been happier to turn 25. What a sensitively, positively fucked up year it’s been, but I’m no longer writing it off as ‘another year’ over with like I used to. We only get so many birthdays in a lifetime… so you bet I’m going to do my best to make every year better than the last.

Running low on reads, but here’s a great book for you

I'm pretty beat and running low on headspace so I'll leave the bulk of my recap here. I haven't been reading as widely but I've been obsessed with Ruined by Design by Mike Monteiro.

If I were to compile a mandatory reading list for all designers, this would sit nicely in there as Design Ethics 101.