Reality check.
About our “find-life”
Read this, in Tagalog, here.
Quite the rough ride.
I haven’t posted about work in the past two months. To the point where a client pointed out that I seem to write quite a bit of “political” posts.
I actually don’t mean to write about politics, per se. Instead, what I believe — is how can someone whose job it is to care about people, and how they use products and services, not react or feel frustrated about what her job could do for the larger context of her community?
I can easily write updates about my job, the business — new methods we’re trying; tools we’re encountering, on-field stories.
But for a number of weeks, they seemed to pale in importance to what was going on in our offline and online social networks — what people were worried about, posting about, arguing about. Researchers, of all people, aren’t numb. And, designers shouldn’t be.
You can’t speak about “Human Centered Design”, and only talk about “design”.
Companies (so far) are built and run by people. People with families, loved ones — at the very least, a circle of friends. We live in towns, cities. We have grandparents and hometowns. We are not just our jobs. Our jobs aren’t just jobs. They are a means to live and to support our goals and the people we care about.
“Livelihood”. In Tagalog, “hanap-buhay” (Literally, “find-life”).
I understand that the ideal practical workforce is said to have a separation of “personal life” and “worklife”, where you leave your personal concerns at the office door. I feel though, that somehow, the utopian workplace doesn’t need to have a divide between the values you care about as a human being, and the values that your company tries to uphold.
There is no perfect workplace, of course. But, offices, management, leaders and businesses need to respect that every single person on their payroll believes in certain things. And, they should do their best to learn and manage that these beliefs align with the betterment of society. Heck, even Marlboro is realizing it needs a nontoxic product to survive.
So, for those who read what I write — no, I am not shifting into social commentary. I just believe that how we work and live are already social commentary, without a person even explicitly blogging about it. Choosing to sanitize your thoughts and work — free from human nuance and needs, as if human concerns were bacteria — leads to a robotic, one-dimensional view of capitalism.
Believe me, I’ve been there. Choosing to think of officemates as “just caring about the work”; it gets you somewhere efficiently, but also doesn’t encompass majority of the people you’ll work with. Especially, in a tight-knit, familial society such as ours.
As I mention in weeknotes I write, I’m a fan of open design. If you want to follow the things I’m learning along the way, as a researcher, strategist and teacher, follow me on Medium or subscribe to our yet-to-be-regular newsletter.
