Dear Future Mentors,
Imagine it is February 19th, 1968. The piano intro to Mr. Rogers Neighborhood is airing live on television for the first time. If you’ve never seen it, or your memory is fuzzy, here’s the YouTube link or search for Mr. Rogers Neighborhood first episode. They might scrub the link before I blink again. The first two minutes should do the trick. No, I am not going to fetishize the look for the helpers quote⁶.
Mr. Rogers was a master of speaking slowly, intimately and honestly. He took time to help children understand their feelings, emotions and curiosities. He demonstrated how to listen, and showed them how moments of silence are normal, important and valued. Mr. Rogers showed children how to slow down and let an idea sink in. He interacted with children through the television screen in a way that made them feel like he cared. In reflection, Mr. Rogers may have been one of the best mentors I’ve ever had.
Today I work in UX design and research. I have freelanced within the interaction design field in New York City since 2018. I come from a prior career as a landscape architect, with degrees in visual communications and environmental design, and I’ve mentored and managed designers. I am uniquely qualified to know what a seven year trajectory looks like in one design field, and also understand what it’s like to change paths and experience the beginning again.
Many people are entering the field of Interaction Design today. Undergraduates are stepping into their first professional experiences. Career changers are switching into this field from related and unrelated professions. And, there is a fire storm of content online saying a “decent paycheck” awaits you if you can land a job. The promise makes me think of a thousand carrots dangling, just out of reach, over a pool of hungry bunnies.
Based on the questions I’ve been fielding from folks entering interaction design for the last two years, people are struggling to find good sources of information. It’s not because there is a lack of information, it’s because there is too much. They are having trouble identifying which sources can be trusted. They don’t know who to follow or where to do it because there are so many voices, tweets, articles, blogs, videos and news feeds. Consuming internet content when entering a new field is exhausting. You can burn out quick if you don’t keep a bucket of water handy.
Seasoned interaction design professionals love studying how human behavior crashes head on into digital aspects of modern life. They are design-focused, research-oriented, and wildly curious. They are iterative. They hack projects, situations and themselves. These individuals are resourceful and incredible teachers. Many of them also benefit from having been born at a time when the internet was a baby. They have been able to grow with the internet, side by side over time as it has become the behemoth it is today. They remember what life was like before the internet, the good parts, and the inefficient parts. They know how to identify fluff, fakery and great contributors. They are the sages people new to the field need to have by their side. Sages can help teach them how to fish while they learn to sail on the ocean.
In May of 2019, I stumbled across a UX mentorship program in New York City. By the stroke of luck and a handshake, I became a mentee in a matter of minutes. But I also learned later on that over seventy mentees had hopes of obtaining a mentor from a pool of thirty that night. Forty potential mentees walked away empty handed. This ratio felt disturbingly unbalanced.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the mentees without mentors. If all seventy mentees had been paired with mentors, a hundred mentors could be populated for the next cohort. Not all new mentors would have the prowess of a 5–10 year veteran, but at least they could turn around and help someone with less experience than themselves. I kept ruminating. In a field that has been flexing its muscles since the early 90’s, why was there a perceived lack of experienced mentors present in one of the greatest cities in the world?
In 2019 I joined the volunteer NYC Interaction Design Foundation (IDF)leadership team. I joined to facilitate closing the gap in community relationship building. Our NYC leadership group is run by a team of seven. We listen to our members and our peers to inform our content. We design our events around questions we see sending repeat signals. We employ user experience design and research methods to improve our impact within the five boroughs.
Today, we have over 1300 members in our NYC IDF local group. We maintain a growing Slack channel and we rank as the top local IDF group in the United States. Two weeks ago we hosted a job-preparation workshop. Once a month, I try and host a digital UX Happy Hour. Last summer we hosted a picnic in Central Park. Our hardworking leadership team spends time each week elevating our professional community experience alongside educational opportunities.
In January of 2020 we launched our IDF NYC mentorship program to build more stronger, authentic relationships. Modeled on the bring your whole self to work philosophy², we provide How to Be a Great Mentor/Mentee webinars for our cohorts and we’ve developed a Guideline for Mentorship resource. We will resume facilitating in person meetups for each cohort to attend when safe. We think we all can benefit from stronger relationships in our communities, by getting to know each other’s strengths, weaknesses, differences and similarities.
We have all felt the impact of Covid-19 on our ability to connect in person. This sucks and it feels like an anxiety cocktail with a double shot of trauma. In New York City, we bang our pots and pans to connect and say thank you and support the front line workers. We organize mutual aid groups. We patronize our local bars and restaurants by ordering whatever takeout options we can to help keep them afloat. We hope they can survive, as they are our community lifelines, and our public living rooms. We have been separated from the energy of New York City and from each other. Now more than ever, it is important that we find new ways of connecting. Protesting together for social injustice is one, mighty, powerful way of connecting. It is of utmost importance. But not every way we connect going forward should require us to literally put our lives on the line at the epicenter of a global pandemic to build relationships.
Mentorship is an outlet for connecting authentically and helps us to process our collective experiences, personally and professionally. Mentorship has the power to destroy social injustice by getting to know someone you don’t. It is a place we can connect, grow, listen and teach each other. Modern mentorship doesn’t flow in one direction. We each contribute to the relationship by drawing from our own unique life experiences. We all have stories to tell, and we get better telling our stories when we practice. When we share, our orating craft becomes more concise, and more memorable. Our stories become conversations that help move the world forward one relationship at a time.
Mr. Rogers once said…wait, you’re not a child and neither am I, and it’s f-ing 2020. Let’s get to work.¹
Sign up for our next IDF NYC Mentorship Program by filling out this Mentorship Opt-In form and volunteer a little bit of your time. The next cohort starts June, 2021.
Know anyone who could mentor? Send them this post.
Upcoming Events:
Our Webinar dates are announced on our Slack channel. Our mentorship program is open to IDF members and non-members. All are welcome. Spread the word.
Questions?
Still have questions?
Email our NYC IDF Support and Programs Lead
tenaya.idf@gmail.com
References:
- How to Make this Moment the Turning Point for Real Change, by Barack Obama, June 1st 2020.
- Bring Your Whole Self to Work by Mike Robbins and Jodi-Ann Burey’s TEDxSeattle’s perspective on Why you should not bring your authentic self to work.
- Mr. Rogers Neighborhood Website. Please feature the first-ever episode on your site so I can update my hyperlink. Thanks.
- Interaction Design Foundation NYC Group Website
- Interaction Design Foundation Website
- The Fetishization of Mr. Rogers’s ‘Look for the Helpers’ by Ian Bogost, October 29, 2018.
