Notes from intermission: cleanup, introduction, workshop
We’re through the clean-up-everything phase of intermission, and now it’s on to the create-new-things phrase. This is tripartite, involving:
- writing some new pieces for the book
- editing & firming up the introductory course
- creating a marketing strategy for the workshop.
Once that all is done, we’ll be past the meat of intermission.
Membership
As mentioned, we want to migrate memberships from their own separate site (which nobody looks at) to this list (which everybody looks at). 99% of the problem here is in the “technical folderol” bucket, and the other 1% is a matter of actually doing the thing. Towards that end, I have opened some support inquiries with some very nice & helpful humans, and now sit in a bit of a limbo.
Practice
Tomorrow I’ll be getting on a very crowded airplane to another continent, for reasons. For a minute, there may either be very little to report (because I’ll be disassociating in a park) or a lot to report (because the time zone difference will enable me to get lots of work done). In the meantime, some things have come through regarding the practice, as they tend to when I have sufficient spaciousness to really consider it.
Writing
The first is around writing. I think I have a bit of internal pressure to post something lockstep, both here, for members, and on text. In doing so I end up writing around 6,000 words a week. I can do this, but I can’t really make any of it great. And the goal, I think, is to turn out great work.
So in order to protect the quality of the work, and make things that are recommendable, the answer is to shift the publishing schedule so that I can arrive to this practice as a more variable thing. Sometimes I go periods without much to say, and I always drop bricks when I’m forced to say something.
Because I care about design getting shipped, we’re focusing much of our upcoming work on the most important topics facing design: leveraged power, qualitative insight, and spaceholding. Comprehensively addressing these issues is the only way that design can become actual.
This takes deep reflection. New ideas take a long time to gestate. I don’t know how to fit any of that into a weekly publishing schedule.
Software
The second major question is around software. We’re currently on retainer with a lovely business that we’re getting a solid impact for. We want to do more of that work. We’re spending some of our spare time figuring out who to reach out to, how to address their expensive problems, and create new ways of generating profit through design.
If you work in software and want to increase your profit (who doesn’t?) with someone who is both good at design and fun at parties, reach out.
The workshop
Finally, I’d like to elaborate a little on the workshop.
Our live workshop went really well when we ran it a few months ago. It was validating for us – so much so, in fact, that we made a self-paced version. Then we launched it. Then we went on intermission.
You can guess how well it sold.
We can do better than this. As a result, we’re chatting with a few others to figure out next steps.
Anyway
The best thing we’ve read lately is the only recommendable book about design to come out since 2019. It is universally correct, the medicine we’ve needed, and the book I wish I had written over the past couple of years.
Beyond that, I put my garden to rest for the winter. How about you?