Pulled into the orbit

Recently I’ve been feeling disconnected from my work—or more specifically, disconnected from professional discourse and from my fellow design and content practitioners.

Some of that comes with being an independent consultant (*grizzled vigilante voice* I work alone); some of that is the result of a powerful need to distance myself from an increasingly self-destructive and dehumanizing tech industry.

But a lot of it is because I’ve lost many of the things that had previously kept me tethered to the practice. Twitter no longer exists, and professional conversations have only fractured across its replacements. The annual conferences I used to attend no longer exist, and even if they did, there’s still a pandemic on. And I no longer have my publishing work, which—here’s something I took for granted—used to function as an anchor, a consistent long-term goal to return to, while dipping in and out of short-term client projects.

It’s no wonder that I suddenly find myself reevaluating everything: how I approach my work, how I find clients, how I even fit anymore into a landscape obsessed with product optimization and corner- and cost-cutting. Being an independent information architect in 2024 has been frustrating, disheartening, alienating.

But it turns out the antidote to my malaise has been surprisingly easy to access. Do you want to know what it is? Are you ready? Buckle up for this one. It’s pretty nuts. Here we go. Look out. It’s:

Talking to people.

No, shut up, listen: If the problem is disconnection, the answer is to make deliberate connections. Wild, I know. So that’s what I’ve been doing: just talking. Having conversations. Asking friends to hop on a Zoom. Reaching out to colleagues I haven’t caught up with lately. Chitchatting! Connecting.

That’s hardly an earth-shattering notion, but it does require actual action—something more than sitting and waiting for others to do it first (or just scrolling LinkedIn). In fact, it’s so obvious, so simple, that it keeps repeatedly shocking me. Because the effects of these conversations on my brain have been anything but obvious and simple. I want to go around shaking people by the shoulders, yelling, “Did you know? Did you know you can just talk to people? On purpose? You can just ask them how they are and what they’re working on and they will tell you? And the conversations will be sweet and unpredictable and energizing and challenging and earnest and make you, just a little bit, fall in love with your work again?”

Because you can, and they will.

In related news: I’ve relaunched my website, and I’m looking for projects! If you’ve got a knot of complicated content—a messy website, a messy system, a messy product, a messy (*gestures at every team’s internal documentation*)—I’d love to help you untangle it. And/or: has it been a while since we’ve caught up? I’d love to hear about your work!

“Research as leisure activity”

I absolutely adored this piece from designer and writer Celine Nguyen, which has provided me (an ex-academic, poet, and tumblr enthusiast) with an articulation of why I rabbit-hole on the internet so much, and why that has value:

“The motel room, or: on datedness”

Architecture critic Kate Wagner on the concept of “dated” spaces—which has something in common, I think, with my recent thoughts on texture:

“The limits of ‘data-driven’”

I love data, but my experience working with self-proclaimed “data-driven” cultures is that you can’t do anything—not change a color, not relabel a page, not edit a button—unless you can prove, with numbers, that it will increase conversion. That’s tedious, and also misleading, since numbers can lie (or at the very least, not tell the whole truth). So I enjoyed designer Pavel Samsonov’s look at a recent “data-driven” mistake from Nike:

Lightning round

• “YOU are a fragment of the Lord God’s divine will made earthly in the form of A FOURTH-CENTURY GOOSE” [Grant Howitt]

• Incredible collages that I would like to lovingly refer to as horse tornadoes [Lola Dupre]

• Artist Robbii Wessen’s cover illustrations for The Absolute Sound magazine [tumblr]

• “It’s hard to explain the generational importance of Homestar Runner without sounding insane.” [Sam Thielman at Flaming Hydra]

August’s causes

This month, let’s donate to Islamic Relief USA, providing relief and development to a whole range of projects in America and abroad, including emergency support for both Palestine and Sudan. I’m also donating to If Not Now, a Jewish-led organization working to divest the American government from Israeli military interests.

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