In this episode I ask why I've posted so few things in 2022. It's a bit about what I'm currently working on and it's also something I've been trying to figure out for years.

Related Links and Resources

Games and Classes Rob offers and Ways to Support the Polytechnicast

Whether the work that you take on is building on skillful work in the past or not, things got to the way they are for some reason. Now you're here. In this journal I share reasons to find others past work as useful research and signals to help instead of joining a narrative that it has little to no value. Even if that past work wasn't well done, it holds clues and questions to dig into.

Related Links and Resources

Games and Classes Rob offers and Ways to Support the Polytechnicast

Have you been part of an organization that seems to repeat projects that don't learn much from one another? It's a thing I've wondered: why do companies forget? This episode of the Polytechnicast I journal about group memory and wonder if it would be helpful to remember what different teams have tried and learned in the past. Is it because we resist repeating other peoples stories?

Related Links and Resources

Games and Classes Rob offers and Ways to Support the Polytechnicast

Any path that brings you to journaling about your art, here I share some context around planning what you'd want to get out of your journaling plus choosing and creating prompts that are a good fit for what you want.

Related Links and Resources

Rob's Products and Ways to Support the Polytechnicast

Something I'm grateful for is to be on a learning adventure together with folks I've worked with. At times I get questions from folks who listen to the show and folks I've been on teams with in the past. I'm going to include all this in a category of listener questions and make a few Polytechnicasts based on these questions.

In this episode I get a question from a colleague who is wondering about practicing communication skills coming from a product team and engineering perspective. How could this help with understanding and communicating your own philosophy and values in a collaboration?

The emotional work of discovering, including, representing, and collaborating in design is what I explore in this think aloud journal. This recording didn't start as a Polytechnicast or even an exploration about UX Mindset but that's where I found myself going.

Since the beginning of 2021 I've been blogging every day on my Interactive Storyteller blog. I hope you'll join me there too as I talk about illustrating, making games, and UX design. It's very much the prose form of the Polytechnicast.

Here I explore some of the reasonable and unreasonable goals I had for this month of journaling and developing the UX Mindset series. Practicing this kind of thing helps you meet your own creative process quirks and explore ways to change and work around those quirks. I recorded so many more rough draft journals than I posted, at least 2:1 if not 3:1. It helped me explore the big topic and discover a concept for a UX Mindset book.

We'll see where the UX Mindset series goes from here. Probably be back on the Polytechnicast, certainly will be in upcoming workshops, and a good chance I'll persue developing a book.

Actively learning is a lot like using applied research. It's a very useful place to work from, you can be confident enough to proceed making things yet not too confident to prevent learning as you go.

We setup teams and organizations to sink or swim based on too much certainty. We're certain often from a combination of ego and efficiency seeking without adapting until expensive mistakes happen. What if we practice being confident enough and setup teams to actively learn instead?

And the UX Mindset series continues!

Where does UX go wrong? Whether a system is broken at the surface or takes deeper understanding to see how it's not serving the health of its audience along with it's other constituencies: UX can be used to help fix or to make things worse. How can that be? Organizations have a lot to do to just exist and maintain exsistence. Some are not questioning things they could question to fix what's broken. Let's pay attention, be curious, inclusive and move what we make toward collective health.

And the UX Mindset series continues!

It's useful to have even a rough concept of what you're working toward, things you know are important or likely to encounter, or at least are worth checking to see if they'd be helpful. For example, a mental model like a creative progression going from rough concept to refined to complete. You can have a UX Mindset informed mental model of getting your work done so that you are working toward including your audience.

And the UX Mindset series continues!