Areas of interest
These are some professional-adjacent topics that I currently find myself thinking about and trying to do something about in my own work. It’s like, the business school section of my website. Basically, if it’s in here, it’s something that a few years ago probably would’ve tried to turn into a Medium post but now am content to simply mull over and perhaps tweet about.
Creative organization
How should creative teams be organized? Are they part of marketing? How do they relate and overlap to, say, a product design team? What if there are two product design teams: physical and digital? Should all the designers hang out, or should the disciplines be separate? What’s the best way to build an in-house agency or studio?
Transit, urban planning, and housing politics
I love cities. We need to build more housing in cities, so that more people can live in and love cities, and we also need more and better public transit to move those people around, so they have a lower carbon footprint and a generally pro-social lived experience. I also love bikes. Talk to me about this, please.
Taxonomies & information architecture
Card sorting is like, a hobby for me. I love it. I love sorting things into buckets and categories. I would be so good at macrodata refinement. If you want to talk taxonomies, I’m ready to go.
Professional-grade personal software
We’re perhaps (as of this writing, in spring 2022) at the end of a long golden age of consumer-friendly enterprise software: Airtable, Notion, and the dozens of other slickly-designed productivity things. We’re seeing more people, myself included, adopt these professional tools into their personal lives, as paid products. So, I am thinking, I wonder when we will see paid, professional-grade software designed for everyday personal use, so that we can escape the ad-supported model and build actually good, premium software for, say, personal calendars or to-do lists or travel planning or what have you.
Community management & design
Every business is talking about community these days, but mostly they just mean email subscribers and Instagram followers. I’m interested in how communities form both organically, and how they can be designed from scratch around a product or service, like “Design Twitter” or “Skincare Tikok” or even whatever those Web3 Discords are doing.
Notes & knowledge management
In a similar vein as my interest in professional-grade personal software, I’m always trying out new note-taking methods and figuring out different models of filing away information. I have personal Airtable bases built out, I’m a frequent user of Are.na, all that jazz. But I still don’t think anyone has cracked the code, because there’s no single code to crack. Everyone remembers information differently. I am curious about the implications of this in a work environment: what’s the translation layer? Is it a strict, hierarchical system? A decentralized free-for-all where you just count on smart, talented people to figure it out? Why does every internal company wiki suck so much? I would like to figure it out, because I seem to spend way too much time trying to find information rather than using the information to do my own job!