It’s all gravy

weeknotes

24 Feb

I stopped writing for 18 weeks and this is what I learnt:

Forgetting is easy, writing is very hard. This paradox makes the career thing a bit harder.
During this time, I travelled to 2 countries, started and completed a whole project at work, and even got to mid-draft of my dissertation. Can I tell you about it? Sure. It’ll only take me X hours to recall what on earth happened.
But being on autopilot is sometimes ok too.
I fell in love with reading again—hyphens are my new thing—and it made me miss writing. A lot.
I missed routine. The weeknotes stopped, so did a few other things. So I spent some time scrambling on my feet, wasting my time, but I think I’ve found one again.
No-one missed me, except the only people I thought would care. It validates that my writing doesn’t have to be some precious piece of work for the internet, and I can keep this personal.
I don’t know if I’ll keep writing every week, just because I have a million other plates to spin and I’m. Freaking. Busy.

Starting a new project

I wish I could tell you about my 6-week stint on a UX role for a digital bank, but it was all gravy (and over) now. Now and later, I’m back to being a service designer for a semi-public finance service in Discovery. It’s the work I wanted to do: complicated, undocumented, even puzzling. The roadblocks: lots of change anxiety, lower engagement, and very slow. The pace has been an adjustment for me, but I’m also a little tired of designing for speed. So maybe slow is a good thing.

Reflecting on my experience

As we get to performance year end, I started thinking about my experience/portfolio as less of a narrative, but more of a visualised network. I’ve been fortunate enough to work in large government agencies, from serviced loans to front door, big retail, digital banking and now another investment-related service. There have been many interesting relationships between them at play, and I wonder how this helps me cast wide as much as deep in skillset between service, systems and interaction design.

Learning about conversational theory

Onto the Masters stuff. I started taking Mondays off for school and it’s been a game-changer for my overall wellbeing. These days I’m working on a conversational prototype, as a tool to help people enhance death literacy (what we understand about death, from rituals to medical decisions). So far, my research has found that people want to plan for death, but often lack the knowledge and skills to start. In Bandersnatch fashion, the concept is a ‘build your own death’-like experience—through simple, realistic nudges. Lots of thinking has been poured into the journey-building, and I’m definitely being thrown into the deep end, but it’s time to get as much design/feedback cycles in before April.