Here Be Dragons
As chance would have it, my father and I both spent our 30th birthdays as brand-new residents of Boston. We were also both executing career shifts at the time. His shift was into academia from a law career in Greece. The move was instigated by a vicious Junta that disrupted and misruled the country for seven years in the late sixties. Mine–by no stretch as controversial–was from a long run as a studio artist and professor, into a practicing designer. Still, it gives me pause. As a child, I looked to adults and assumed that their whole lives were a clean trajectory leading to the person I knew them as. It’s a messy business to realize that’s not true. As such, I wanted to take this chance to reflect on the fuzzy calculus of changing careers; what we take with us and what we leave behind.
There’s more to life than good weather
I’m talking to one of my best friends while hiking in the northeast hills of Los Angeles, trying to decide whether or not to move on to something new and unknown. The California sun, though beloved to me, has baked my brain. I feel suffocated, stagnant. I can’t make the changes I want to make in life when I’m so set in familiar and destructive patterns. For work, I drive from school to school, teaching a part-time course here or there. “Freeway faculty” is what aspiring full-time professors (of Los Angeles) called this right of passage. Something isn’t right though. The right of passage isn’t ending. If allowed, I fear the pattern could continue indefinitely. I’ve seen it happen. The siren song of the east coast, I think, is calling me home.
Leveling up
In the back of my head, I have a three-part model of personal impact I like to consider from time to time. It works like this. Part 1: Make work that critically examines the future. Highly speculative work; highly idealistic. Hopefully, this work gets people to imagine the world as it could be. This is the part of my brain that is activated by my artistic practice of sculptures and short films. Part 2: Make work that impacts the present and nearer-future. Don’t just complain about the products you use and the systems you are a part of. Be the Trojan Horse; roll your sleeves up and actually work within the design, tech and/or business world to impact products and services today. Part 3: Consume content and knowledge, either out of necessity, pleasure and/or ethnographic study. This is the identity I am least proud of.
By 2014 the proportions feel all wrong. One and three are vastly overpowering two. I consume daily and sure, I produce too, but I make artwork about the far future. It’s interesting to me but lacking in the impact I want. I work as a teacher, but I don’t think about it as my career because I can’t see a future in it. Fulfilling as it is to work with students, I’m deeply disturbed by the predatory and manipulative practices of large universities as they shift toward operating more like corporations; inflating costs and relying increasingly on cheap, temporary labor. Turning professors into hustling freelancers, after all, makes the relationship between teacher and student a transactional one. This is poisonous to me. I want out. At this time I want to find a way to enact more actionable change. To make the things I use better, not just consume them. And not just make work about imagined places, spaces and times.
I suspect that finding balance between these three types of impact (consumer, trojan horse, dreamer) will be the ongoing work of my life.
History never repeats itself, but it rhymes
Shifting into a UX career was somehow an easy choice and made so much narrative sense to me, even if it didn’t to others. I never knew what I wanted to study. I ended up going to design school at a large technical university, switching to art and simultaneously studying computer science. I made robotic sculptures and created paintings with software. I went to graduate school for new media art and design. I tried a lot of things but never truly felt comfortable in any one community. Hybridity, though uncomfortable, always felt appropriate. How can you otherwise prepare for the interesting opportunities of the future that don’t yet exist?
Looking back now, I believe that art stuck to me because it was always a vehicle by which a ferocious curiosity about the world could be placated. If I wanted to learn about motors and mechanisms, I’d make an art project using them. Public policy about water use in Los Angeles? Make an art project about it. Understand the burgeoning “space tourism” industry? Art project. I feel little loyalty to the art industry or community. I just wanted to explore new ideas and creative methodologies. Experience design, I felt, could scratch a similar itch and allow me to dig deeply into different topics, communities and technologies to figure out how they work from the inside.
Making the transition was challenging– I worked hard, called in favors, took classes, networked, failed repeatedly. To make this work, the lessons from previous jobs, projects and life experiences would have to be repurposed and rebranded. Much self reflection ensued. From teaching, for example I took patience, storytelling and presentation. Strategically, the design of syllabi was an ongoing practice. It took empathy to put myself into the minds of students and think about how best to introduce concepts to newcomers, what sort of exercises could best reinforce their learning and how I would measure success. I changed my syllabi every term and tested what did and didn’t work. I solicited feedback from my students and implemented it every following semester.
Putting together an art exhibit was a similar exercise. When I would do a project for a show, I would consider the experience of somebody viewing my work. For me, the point of the show isn’t for you to marvel at what I might make. It’s to find a way to invite you into my thought process; start a dialog with you and get you to consider what the work means to you. It’s a chance for me to get inspired and try new things for the next show. Making art taught me to love process more than the product, and to be comfortable with ambiguity. It taught me to trust that I may not wind up where I originally intended, but getting there will be exciting and revealing.
Terra Incognita
One year later and it’s my birthday again, but this time I’m deeply embedded in my first UX job. Returning to my personal model of impact, I fear now the proportion still isn’t totally right. But mostly I’m feeling pleased about the work i’m doing, the skills i’m developing and the people i’m meeting. I’m also extremely humbled by the constant recognition of what I don’t know and what I wish to improve. This is a good thing. I’m hesitant to say I finally found what i’ll be doing the rest of my life, but only because i’m sure our career will be unrecognizable in ten years. But it’s the UX designer’s love of process (and thus, ambiguity) that makes that an exhilarating proposition and not a downside.
May we live in interesting times.
The views expressed in this post are that of the author and may not reflect the views of the agency or company.
