May Update & Looking Ahead
In this post, I plan to go back to my roots of making much ado about nothing and writing 7 reflective/planning posts for every one post of content. Jokes aside, I am trying to avoid this, but given that I haven’t posted in awhile I think a scheduling post is appropriate.
There is one important announcement that this post can’t go without: I am incredibly honored to announce my admission to the HCDE Bachelor’s program for Autumn 2020!
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere before, the original purpose of this blog was primarily to serve as an artifact accompanying my application that could represent my learning & interest in the broader field of design. With that purpose now complete, I still intend to continue the blog.
By no means do I intend to stop learning. However, not everything I deem important to learn will necessarily be recorded here. I am likely going to shift this blog from design topics to almost anything, though I don’t have a clear picture of this in my head yet. A few examples: I am going to need at least a conceptual understanding of Machine Learning going forward, but it isn’t a topic that’s really essential to any understanding of design. Similarly, I am pursuing longer-term career goals related to Product Management, of which UX is only one piece. In the past few weeks, I’ve still been involved in learning, and am now entering the fourth week of a book club I started with a couple of friends. I’ve just been a bit slower than usual as I haven’t been very productive and sort of doing a bare minimum in the last few weeks of quarantine. In the near future, I definitely see this improving. However, I have a rapidly approaching deadline that requires me to know a lot more about web design than I currently do, so I will probably suspend WebGraph and multiple other series for the time being and instead upload notes about general web design principles, likely starting today or tomorrow.
Finally, in light of recent conversations I’ve had, I am now able to see this blog as a viable resource for others. Particularly for new students in design, like HCDE 210 students at UW. I don’t intend to change the tone of my posts — I won’t pretend to be an expert on anything I’m writing about, and leave those posts to the rest of the writing base on this platform — but I will be more conscious of the value I could potentially provide to others.
I am glad that I’ve been able to get to where I am now, but I know I have a lot more work left to do, and many different and unique skills to learn to round myself out better. I hope to continue sharing these skills and developing this blog as a reflection of my learning going forward.
To finish up, an interesting UX quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan, which we are reading in book club this week:
The only controls available to those on board were two push-buttons on the center post of the cabin — one labeled on and one labeled off. The on button simply started a flight from Mars. The off button was connected to nothing. It was installed at the insistence of Martian mental-health experts, who said that human beings were always happier with machinery they thought they could turn off.
Vonnegut has been incredibly spot on with a number of technological or occupational predictions now, for a book that was published in 1959. For context, there were certainly an immensely tiny number of professionals considering things like this, but Norman’s DOET wasn’t originally published until 1988, a full three decades after this was written.
I’ve also been walking around a lot to exercise in quarantine, so here’s the mandatory thumbnail photo, this time from a park in my neighborhood.
