Now

Last Updated 25 October 2023

I’ve been writing a lot Really since the summer, I’ve been more prolific than I’d been in years. It’s continued into fall. The Consequence Design project still exists online and was a good jumpstart for putting my ideas on paper. I think if the demise of web 2.0 behemoths like Twitter had any real positive effect, (besides the collapse of my entire online social network) it’s that I’ve increasingly found myself deciding to take content that would’ve gone to Twitter or some kind of side-quest instagram account and host it myself instead.

The networks that exist still have minor amplification value, because for better or worse, when you don’t live in a major market and aren’t attending conferences regularly — and even if you are — it’s a lot of work to maintain some kind of relevance for your ideas. Twitter was awful for a lot of thing, but growing an audience there over a decade plus truly changed my life in ways that simply wouldn’t have been possible had I not been able to circulate my writing, share my talks, and grow my passion for craft.

I migrated some writings over to a blog using blot.im. It’s flat file CMS that doesn’t require any kind of db which makes me happy, because part of the reason I’ve gone to having such spartan websites in the past few years is all of the overhead of managing a designed website, especially if you’re a semi-perfectionist. The reality is, while I have okay skills in front-end development, I’m too slow to do what I’d really want and I find no-code solutions to be more bloated than what I want.

Ultimately, I’m better at writing and sharing my work, so I’ve optimized for creating the speediest web + writing stack to get my ideas out, versus worrying about making a pretty site. When I do need that, I can leverage some other options.

Teaching in the Winter I’m in the syllabus design stages of planning to teach a course at the University of Michigan’s Taubman School of Architecture and Urban Planning this January. The undergraduate course is a Service Design studio for 3rd year undergraduates in their Urban Technology BS program, which is just three years old.

Leaving the west coast for the frigid midwest at the height of winter is going to be wild, it’s been 6 years since I’ve had to endure a winter out there, but I’m very much looking forward to being in front of a classroom and getting to talk about service design with people are unfamiliar with it, will be a great job.

Before I do that, I’m actually doing a half-day guest lecturing situation at George Fox University, in November. We’re going to talk about service design there, too. Hopefully my syllabus for Michigan will be nearly done then, making drafting a lecture for this group a lot easier. My problem with talking about service design isn’t what to say, but how to constrain the wide array of things I can talk about.

Design Book Club Portland’s chapter of the International Interaction Design Association has been mostly dead for about six years. Having started the Indy one when I lived there, I wanted to help resurrect it, because some topics fit better for that group. The pandemic has mostly mothballed most membership organizations that didn’t have a huge audience, and IxDA is among them.

Since I became President of AIGA Portland in July, it’s not as ideal for me to try to resurrect another group that doesn’t have a natural audience, in a city that is notoriously reclusive in winter (and kind of, all the time.) But I do think bringing back the UX Book Club will be cool, so I’m trying to find some folks to co-lead a Design Book Club that’ll probably launch in March or April, and will be fairly chill and meet at a bar or coffee shop. Drop me a note if you see this & would like to help.

I’m also trying to reboot an old dev meetup called <a href=”https://donutjs.club/“DonutJS, but that’s going to take a bit more effort and will probably not happen until next summer or later.

This is a <a href=”https://nownownow.com/about”Now page based on Derek Sivers movement that let’s people know what you’re up to.

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