Looking back & forward
First post back to “reactivate” the blog here — at this point I have only about 10–20% of an intention of having this be a “portfolio” piece, and about 0% of an intention for it to be very polished and/or formal. Let’s quickly revisit my last post (May 2020, 3 years ago) and apply any adjusments as needed.
In May 2020, I was admitted to UW’s HCDE program. I spent a few quarters in the program, but due to a combination of course structure and the global pandemic disagreeing with me, I became unsure of my future in the program. I decided that I valued the skills I had gained through the journey so far but elected to transition out of the major to Geography, as my interest in wireframing (sarcasm) was quickly surpassed by other passions, namely transportation design, environmentalism, and political action. I am still an undergrad with an estimated graduation date of Dec 2023.
Otherwise, I actually correctly identified that I was likely to expand the scope of the blog past design into whatever I felt like writing about. This will be the motto moving forward — I’ll write out my ideas on a range of topics, with some general guidelines and restrictions. In somewhat particular order, here’s what I’m envisioning now:
1 — “Become a Producer instead of a Consumer”
I actually don’t know if there’s a general consensus on the value of “self-improvement” related material or not, but my opinions here are two. One, that if the primary goal of the person or group behind the content is to sell you something, it’s not ideal, and two, that there is a clear law of diminishing returns on self-improvement knowledge. If you feel like you’re learning something new each time you encounter this type of content, you’re probably still at the beneficial point in the curve where you’re learning many things that you can try to apply — if you consume self-improvement content and you routinely feel like the person is saying nothing new, it’s probably because you’re not the target audience anymore, and you need to just go apply the things you’ve already heard. With that said, I think I crossed that threshold years ago and there are only certain topics that I’ll even bother with anymore, but this is one of them. The core argument behind this point in the video is that there is inherent value in creating things, even without an end goal (publishing, income, etc etc.), for a variety of reasons, including helping with processing and retention to a greater degree than simply consuming information. This is the #1 reason I will continue to write here — not really for some output or deliverable, but as a way to collect my own thoughts.
2 — I will continue to write mostly informally
I still fully intend to communicate information, but given the aforementioned lack of intent for this to be professional material, I’ll only edit minimally and will use whatever structure I see fit. I actually believe this is good practice anyway — professional communication skills are important, but I feel fine in this area already anyway — and informal is the mode for the vast majority of our communications, including friends, family, or whoever else you may want to share knowledge with.
3 — I will avoid overly reflective or personal content
For the first bit, I definitely felt like I was too often stuck writing these meta-posts about what I wanted for the blog, then measuring my goals compared to what I intended for the blog, and so on to the point where I wasn’t actually writing much substantial anymore. To the second point, I have a journal and other outlets to do so, and I don’t think it needs to belong here.
That’s it for now — I’ll be looking through the drafts I had left behind and seeing what I want to spin out into fully fledged posts soon.
Rand
