Weird times

this is a difficult time for most of us, with tens of thousands of Americans unemployed, and more than 50,000 COVID deaths. I have seen a lot of drastic societal changes in my life, I have moved from Europe to the USA, but this is so much bigger. Not just the pandemic, but also seeing 30% of people supporting an incompetent human wreck …while the world is hurtling toward a catastrophic climate crisis. A lot to live with. Especially when responsible for nurturing your kids’ dreams.

I am one of those suddenly unemployed, and I have to admit, I am better off for it. Work takes a toll when you don’t see any meaning in it, but you are still required to make it pixel-perfect, for months on end. I felt stressed out and not growing. I understand this is a minuscule problem, but I have a similarly sized solution. Now that I am unemployed, and surrounded by my whole family at all times, I am happy to slow down, spend my days working with my hands (sewing, drawing, cooking, and gardening), reading, and up-skilling. The opportunities to learn are all at my fingertips, and my biggest challenge is to decide what I should do first. Who would have thought that SQL is so much fun? I am working for a nanodegree in Programming for Data Science in R at Udacity. I am enjoying it even though I am taking small bites of the course every day.

Attending the 2020 Information Architecture Conference – virtually. There are some great talks, and I appreciate the ability to watch them at my own pace, but …. it is just not as enlightening and nourishing as being a part of a real community as when you are interacting in person. More on the talks later.

Participating in another virtual event: the Hack the Gap hackathon. A week-long collaboration of coders and designers, via zoom, hangout, handoffs on Avocode, and Github. An interesting and somewhat eye-opening experience being the only UX person fighting for the user, with four programmers, who focused on making the code work. Hats off to my teammates who were able to do both the back- and frontend programming, while I was just “beautifying” the website:-) UX has a long way to go to evangelize!!! Did I change any minds? I really want to believe that.