Flexibility Is Needed When Designing for Shifts in Life

People change, even if it’s incrementally slow and subtle. Every day, our environment and the context of our lives shifts as we get out of bed, work, and eat our meals. These daily shifts along with gaining knowledge and experience impact our needs and goals as we progress within our lives and careers.

If I think about computational scientists that use supercomputers for their research, their typical first time using a supercomputer is as a post-doc working their professor’s (or mentor’s) research project. At this point in their career, they are still relatively new at writing journal articles, obtaining funding and writing code.

As these post-docs transition to staff positions, their understanding of the domain science deepens and their experience with writing scientific codes to achieve results gets stronger. They also get better at publishing their work, writing proposals for funding and answering the science problem that they set out to solve.

The next progression of their career is staffing a lab or team of their own. At this step, they are well-published, well-funded, and well-respected within their field. With more manpower and more knowledge, they are able to achieve and analyze results faster.

This researcher is still the same person who needs to get results from running scientific code on a supercomputer so that they can publish and be funded, however, their stakes and drivers have changed. He now is responsible to pay for his lab, his staff and his post-docs.

If we think about designing for this person, they’ll retain the same needing a supercomputer to achieve their scientific goals, but their intent and motivations for doing so will shift. The basic features that this researcher required to run his science as a post-doc are still necessary as a senior scientists, but now they need additional features to help manage their team and their team’s results.

This example provides a peek into how a person’s initial need is constant while their intent and motivations change as a person grows within their career. We must use frameworks that encourage a flexibility to add to the problem space over time, adjusting for change.