Weeknotes 103
This was a short week, broken up with a catch up with old friends and punctuated by a day off helping move house. Is it just me or has January already been six weeks long?
I helped my parents move house this week, so I had a shorter than usual four days, still working on the new dashboard functionality of ecosystems. We’re trying to get to a stage where we have enough of a prototype to help with frame some conversations in user research calls, and this has involved a fair bit of desk research, digging into which metrics could be important and marrying that up with what data we’ve got.
Because the product is part of an organisational goal of challenging the normal approach to funding open source software –making it less of a marketing exercise and more part of infrastructure investment– we’re not coming at it as a completely neutral UCD exercise, something that I’m very used to doing in my work in and around government. It has meant challenging some of my default thinking, and disrupting some muscle memory I hold when it has come to planning our research approach and writing discussion guides. Balancing an acceptable level of rigour with opinionated design is a challenge every designer should face with at some point.
Mid week I had a lovely catch up with Nina and Joe, two other ex-TPXers. (TP-exers? Feels like there’s a snappy label in there somewhere) who also left around the same time as me to go freelance. It was nice to hear about their experiences with finding work and blazing their own trails. As well as a quick coffee with Tricia, who left TPX a fair while before who had plenty of tips for me venturing out on my own. I’ve said before that the hardest part of freelance has been losing the community that comes bundled with employment, and TPX had an excellent community of designers, so I was happy to get to replicate that in a small way more than once this week.
Finally, I had a nice little chuckle when we spotted this affordance backfire. Affordance is when the look of something communicates it’s intended function, such as knowing to press a button because it looks ‘pressable’. Well this little storage pocket in our hire-van door looks exactly like it’s designed for a phone, until you shut the door and it gets sheared in half.
The sticker that saved 100 phones
And as a small bonus I took some of last weeks’ weeknote that I’d cut for length and wrote a little blog post about weeknoting.
Listening
The Mars Volta’s Deloused in the Crematorium has been a big feature of my listening this week. I had a lot of reading to do and a fair few chores, and their noisy, prog-rock flavour of post-hardcore has been perfect to burn away a few hours here and there.
Watching
Rivals. Not sure about this one, I got through the first couple of episodes thinking it was one of those ‘bad things happen to rich people’ shows, ala The Perfect Couple or Triangle of Sadness and it seemed to be heading it that direction but maybe not? Happy to continue watching it for Danny Dyer who I’ve really enjoyed in his ‘Alan Sugarish’ tech mogul role.
