On Spending A Year Designing My Mind

Photo by Bekir Dönmez on Unsplash

“The Future of Design is Designing the Future.”

— David Slayden

Those words, more than anything, are why I decided to apply to this masters program despite my trepidation at any job or degree containing the words “Design.” I’d become fairly competent at predicting the way things tend to go over the years, but there’s not much worse than seeing a future you can’t accept and don’t know how to change. I wasn’t willing to accept any of the obvious choices in front of me so I did something crazy. I signed up for a masters program I figured I was a horrible fit for and forced myself to become something, and someone, new.

I was also a bit surprised when I was accepted into the program. I’d had some previous work experience in UX and Conversational UI in educational software, but at the time I applied I didn’t know if it would be useful. I also had zero visual artifacts in my portfolio, just some of my short stories. I thought I was unprepared, but I had no idea just how true that was and just how much I could grow during this year.

The Concussion and Surviving COVID-19

Things were going much better than I thought they would have at the end of the first semester. My REdesign group had just pivoted to a really interesting topic, I’d gotten some interest from several scientists in my Critical Making Project about how to hack a human brain with VR so we could navigate the world like rats in VR do (that sadly didn’t pan out), and I’d made some good friends. I’d also improved my ability to design and parse visuals immensely from where I started.

In early February, still close to the start of the second semester, I fell down some concrete stairs and hit my head. I was diagnosed with a concussion.

All of the progress I’d made visually since the beginning of the program vanished entirely. I lost my ability to balance almost entirely, it was dangerous to even get on and off the bus to get to the studio and I couldn’t drive. My ability to regulate my emotions was damaged and I didn’t notice until I’d hurt some genuinely good people around me as well as lashed out at a professor I respect. I couldn’t remember things as well as I used to, but I managed to work a bit regardless.

In that professor’s class I managed to pull off an interesting fact-checking project called “Is It True?” that linked up news stories with opinions from experts a user had committed to respecting.

In the second OnTheSnow.com presentation I presented an argument for a value proposition, which in combination with a previous suggestion to breadcrumb the top of their homepage with a secondary task-based information hierarchy, actually got implemented for a bit. Sadly, their back-end couldn’t deal with the rest of my team’s amazing designs.

One month went by and Covid-19 hit and hit hard. I got it almost immediately after it was found in Boulder. I was going to watch my parents house while they went on sabbatical, but they weren’t allowed to leave the country so they were in the house with me as I was quarantined. For the sake of safety, that lasted 6 weeks.

In the middle of those six weeks I woke up coughing up blood and when I got out of bed for medicine, I didn’t have the strength to stand. I fell and hit my head again and I could barely find the strength to grab a hardcover book and hammer my chest with it to loosen up what was in my lungs. But, I survived.

I still had the concussion until at least the middle of April, perhaps the beginning of May, but I was improving. My ability to see, understand, and implement the visual design I was capable of at the beginning of the second semester was slowly returning.

Now, at the end of the program, I’ve finally surpassed where I was at the end of the first semester and the weight of not knowing has left my shoulders.

Bad Habits

I’ll take no habits and total ignorance over a little knowledge and bad habits any day. Here are just three of the worst ones that I started the program with, where they came from, and how I got rid of them (mostly).

Too Loquacious.
Too many words, too much detail. In work I’d done for Boulder Learning and the Institute for Cognitive Science, among other places, I was communicating with academics that were never satisfied with the amount of granularity I was providing. I’d developed an unconscious tic, where if something was wrong I’d increase the amount of information to explain a process rather than decrease the available information and simplify the solution.

I was also intimidated by being in a design masters program with no formal background in design and I desperately wanted to know if anything I’d done previously was portable, at all. I didn’t want to bullshit my way through any of my choices, I wanted to know if I was right or wrong in detail so I could course-correct as fast as possible.

First, I had to realize the problem for what it was. Insecurity. A picture is worth a thousand words, I wasn’t sure if I could communicate my ideas effectively given how poor I was at graphic design. Change came slowly, to put it mildly. To give you an example of how bad it was, I felt proud when one of my classmates said, “I actually understood 90% of what Derek was talking about during that design sprint.”

What allowed change was a change in my perspective. I didn’t have to fully document my process because even if I wasn’t a gifted graphics designer, people trusted my ability to find user insights and in my ability to structure a compelling narrative; in my ability to identify solve user and systems level problems.

Adversarial Decision Theory.
This was the worst possible perspective for a product designer to have and I had no idea I’d unconsciously adopted it working on lexical semantic resources and educational software. Much of game/decision theory assumes that people will continue to play whatever game you design until it’s over because there’s something at stake. That might be a grade, their bank account, their politics, or even their lives. Most of the products that are for sale don’t have that kind of contextually inherent external force that causes a user to interact with them. They have to be compelling on their own and while I understood that consciously, unconsciously I took the users engagement for granted.

Rich Bowen and Jesse Weaver pounded that perspective out of me day after day in the first semester and I’ll be eternally grateful to them for that.

A Pathological Fear Of Visual Design.
I’ve had a number of surprisingly rough experiences stemming from a lack of an ability to draw and I had no idea how deeply rooted they were before the start of this program. As an example, I was almost expelled from high school after being falsely accused of plagiarizing a paper I wrote on To Kill A Mocking Bird. There was no evidence for accusing me, the paper I wrote couldn’t be found anywhere but on the principal’s desk. It didn’t seem to matter, my difficulty with drawing and showing my work in geometry class meant, to a few teachers, that there was no way I was capable of producing solid work anywhere. I eventually vindicated myself by writing things that just couldn’t be found elsewhere, such as the fourth act of Much Ado About Nothing, but I’d solved that problem with words.

Not by showing I could draw.

At least once a week I’d feel humiliated as I showed off my visual designs in one of my classes. I was improving far faster as a visual designer than I thought possible, but that was hard to notice as my talented peers left me in the dust. “What am I even doing here, why did they let me in?” was a question I asked myself often.

It was working with my RE group on our year long project that slowly got me over this issue. I got to work with, in my opinion, the two best visual designers in the program this year and while it was intimidating it was also enlightening. I learned a lot from watching them work, but I learned even more by working with them. The fact that I could solve UX issues and interaction design issues within the Demos UI, the fact that copy and narrative and decision theory was still useful was a start.

The fact that we could all cover each other’s weakness’s with our strengths and build something so amazing, something so genuinely counter intuitive that the fact that it’s even possible still makes me laugh was what I genuinely needed. We built a social media app that intentionally limits how many users can interact with one another at a time… and it’s awesome.

I didn’t just learn that I could do the basics of visual design and how to improve, I learned how to communicate with primarily visual people as a highly verbal one. That’s priceless.

A Short List Of Things I Learned

1. The experience is the brand and the brand is a story.
2. Some stories are jokes. All stories are memories.
3. You design for the user and you are not the user (unless you are, actually, the user).
4. Most creative briefs are terrible. 18–34 year olds that make $50,000 a year is not a useful demographic category.
5. Being upfront about your expectations, and what you can and cannot do is the only workable strategy, long term. It won’t always work out, it won’t always be remembered or respected, but it’s better than the alternative.
6. Sometimes being flippant about your pain and your issue’s isn’t kindness, it’s cruelty. People like to know what they’re dealing with, and it’s okay to let them put you in a box you don’t quite fit as long as you understand that it’s temporary.
7. The right questions are more important than the right answers.
8. Trying not to annoy your professors by not asking weird questions is polite, but genuine gold is buried in that awkwardness. Apologies, people, but I think I learned half of what I did by being willing to look stupid.
9. You’re going to fail no matter what, so fail faster. Fail better. And try again.

Nine seems like a good number to end on.

It’s been a wild ride and a worthwhile one. I’m looking forward to whatever comes next.