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This is the first year I haven’t felt ready to be a year older for as long as I can remember. I looked back through the last few years of writing my personal annual reflection and in each one I seemed ready and excited for the year to come. 

But this year instead of feeling eager to grow up and out, I’m feeling cautious and unsure. I’m not quite as overjoyed as I am in this photo by the brilliant Sian, from back when we could meet friends. I’m not sure if it’s because 27 is starting to feel like a more grown up number or because the last year has been so uncertain that it’s got into my bones.

I considered scrapping this birthday post. Personal updates like these get filed under the largely unshareable and likely only read by 2 people category. Rightly so, it’s a few hundred words of navel gazing. But I know how nice it is to have these records of my years stored somewhere, to be able to look back and see not only where I was but how I was. 

On the cusp of 26 I wrote a manifesto for how I wanted to work. I wanted to create work that was:

  • Is critical of existing power structures
  • Is accessible and transparent
  • Is holistically sustainable
  • Is collaborative
  • Is a challenge to the boundaries of my understanding

I’ve not stayed as true to that as I think I had hoped I would. Those are big goals. They’re goals I still believe in and want to be part of my practice. But I’ve had to focus a little smaller, not least because of the realignment of everything around COVID-19. 

I have aimed higher within my small goals though. Imagining Future Space is my favourite personal project ever by far and I think it fits the kind of shape I had imagined my work might. It’s critical, accessible, collaborative and an imaginative provocation. It was a personal challenge inspired by a much bigger social challenge. It’s visual but it’s much more than that.

I’m also proud that while I’ve produced less for this space what I’ve made is of a much higher quality. Pieces like my decade in review and my pup’s pep talk comic were more work but more fulfilling, they’re the kind of thing I want to be making not that I feel I should be posting to keep a weird idea of an internet presence alive. Surprisingly, this year has been one of the best for the blog so far in terms of viewers and my newsletter is in triple figures, so perhaps it’s working out for the best. 

Away from the internet, or rather away from this corner of the internet, I’m still working on becoming a better design led researcher and a better service designer. I’ve tried to take on a more leadership role – still not sure how I feel about that. I’ve worked on projects I’m proud of, so much so that I spoke at a conference about them, but I’ve not made specific things I want to hold dear. 

I’ve also learned to run, to weave, to live outside of a giant house share. I’ve built a chatbot on my own. I’ve survived a pandemic so far. I’ve survived my own mental health so far.

This year has been hard, really hard. I know I’m incredibly privileged that what has been hard for me is working from home (not losing my job), wrestling with my mental health (not losing my physical health) and finding a way to keep going in uncertainty (while knowing I have something of a social safety net). But it has been hard and continues to be hard.

It’s hard to look up and out while you’re still in the weeds or the thing, but I trust that as I’m working my way through that I’m growing and when I do look up I’ll be taller and see further. 

Right now though, I want to refocus on what’s around me, on making it the best I can. In some ways that feels like a step back from the lofty ambitions I took into 26, but I know I get the most out of myself and my time when I feel like I’ve shored myself to something solid and I’m building something tangible and challenging.

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If I’m completely honest I’ve lost my bearings and my confidence in lockdown. Things I would have otherwise done unthinkingly have become sticking blocks of uncertainty. I’ve been trying to take on a bit of a new role in my work and to challenge myself to do something different with my personal projects and in that process of way finding I’ve been looking up for signs, because that’s what I’d seen others do, and lost my grounding.

When I don’t feel like I’m doing my best or like I’m solidly making progress it gets to me. It becomes a vicious cycle of slipping up or struggling turning into a negative mindset turning into negative ways of working turning into more struggling and on and on. 

In those moments, I’m really the only person who can pull myself out of it. I have a bank of positive feedback that I can turn to for dark days, and people I can turn to for support when I need a helping hand. But when I’m in my own head, there’s only one person who can really make a difference.

So, I wanted to act on some advice I was given by a mentor and a passage from a book I read deep in my running phase of the year that has weirdly stayed with me.

“I kept waiting for all the old ghosts of the past to come roaring out—the screaming Achilles, the ripped hamstring, the plantar fasciitis. I started carrying my cell phone on the longer runs, convinced that any day now, I’d end up a limping mess by the side of the road. Whenever I felt a twinge, I ran through my diagnostics: 

Back straight? Check. 

Knees bent and driving forward? Check. 

Heels flicking back? … There’s your problem”

This largely uneventful moment from Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run, has flickered in my mind for the last few months. Recently I realised why. I need my own checklist, not for running but for work.

My checklist is as follows:

  • Do you know why you’re doing it? – I know I need a light house to be reaching towards so what I’m doing has purpose
  • Have you done your research?- I struggle to engage unless I feel like I’m informed, I don’t need to be an expert but I do need to have an idea of what’s involved whether that’s subject matter or process
  • Have you spoken to the people you’re doing it for? – I’m a user researcher so this seems obvious, and is a reminder to do the work of meeting and working with people, but this is also important for me within our team or any illustration work I do
  • Have you written it down or drawn it? – I like to document everything because a problem articulated on paper is a problem halved, if nothing else it helps me share my thinking and gives me a physical artefact to work with as a starter

But I wanted to share some of how I got to what I wanted on my own checklist, in case anyone else wanted to create their own spot diagnostic. 

I started off by writing about what was happening at times when I felt good doing the activity, in this case my job. I tried to break it down into the smallest most basic things I could. At times it felt like I was being too simple, I ended up with some of the most elemental building blocks, but there’s a reason those things can be seen as clichéd foundations. 

Once I had my big list of things that were going on when I felt good, or was working on something good, I whittled down the list to the things that felt the most important or the most common across those times. I did my best to balance specific things, that felt really tangible, and making the list general and widely applicable. With that short list in hand, I started building my diagnostic.

Learning from the Born to Run example I made my diagnostic things I could check off. They had to be literal, not abstract. There are no feelings on the list, just actions. They are the things I can do that signal or build up to the more abstract things on my list.

Then I drew it up into a format I could use. 

If you want to make your own, here’s a template you can use. (The styling of this template was heavily influenced by Bill Brown’s guest check illustration)

My checklist sits proudly (digitally and physically) as a post it note on my desk and desktop. It’s a clear visible reminder to check in with myself. I’m hoping that having that visual cue, the reminder to check myself before I wreck myself, will eventually help me turn this into a habit rather than something I have to consciously do. 

But until then…

Do you know why you’re doing it? Yes

Have you done your research? Yes

Have you spoken to the people you’re doing it for? Yes

Have you written it down or drawn it? Yes

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I’ve always been a bit suspicious of chatbots and conversational interfaces. There’s something about them I find unsettling, particularly those that learn as they are exposed to more conversation. So when I saw UAL’s Creative Computing Institute was offering an online course inspired by their Feminist Chatbot work through Future Learn, I leapt on the chance to learn more. I wanted to understand more about the designs that left me uncomfortable and have the tools to be part of building something better should the chance ever arise. 

The course itself was four weeks long, but because it was online I took it at my own pace. It offered exactly what it promised on the tin, or rather the course description:

“On this course, you’ll study feminism and its relationship to technology in order to help you build a feminist chatbot. You’ll learn feminist design tools and basic coding skills, before applying them to designing and programming a chatbot of your own.” 

While each section only offered a high level introduction to each of the topics covered, those introductions were clear and offered lots of extra reading if you wanted it. 

The simple chatbot your build through the course is a scripted chatbot, one with predetermined questions and answers, rather than an AI chatbot which uses natural language processing, understandably there was no way anyone could teach someone how to build something using machine learning from scratch in 4 weeks. But it gives you plenty of information about the second kind, and for me it definitely demystified, and in some cases justified my discomfort with, conversational bots of this kind. The more I learned the more I felt empowered when I built my own to do something different.

I had inadvertently been using a lot of the tools and thinking that was covered as “technofeminism” in my work when trying to focus on equity and inclusion more generally, but it was great to have those ideas drawn together into their historical context.

Once we had a background in the context of feminist design and some tools to use in our work. There was a brief section on conversational design. This is the one section I would have liked more on in the course, which largely focused on the feminist aspects of designing the chatbot’s personality. So I sought out some extra reading on how to design conversations, the different kinds of call and response and how to take them beyond just being a flow diagram.

Then it was onto making the chat bot. I did this outside of the course time because I knew I wanted something to work alongside another project I had in the works, Imagining Future Space, and there’s a time limit on Future Learn courses if you’re not a premium member. So I made sure to take plenty of notes, including the handy feminist design prompt.

I mapped out my conversation using Miro. This wasn’t the tool that was recommended in the course, but it’s the tool I’m most comfortable using for this kind of task because it’s become a huge part of our remote working process. 

While mapping was fun, I was surprised that the bit I enjoyed most was actually coding the chat bot. I never consider myself a technical person. I found a real joy in just playing and learning how to do something outside of my normal skill set. There was more than one evening where I found myself typing away hours after I had planned to stop and take a break without even noticing, because I was so engrossed by what I was doing, by seeing something appear on the screen as I built it.

I think one of the big reasons I got so into the building process was how Glitch (the tool we used to code) is structured. I’ve tried to learn to code in the past and always get to a point where I lose interest because there are only so many abstract rules I can hold in my mind at once. But with Glitch you can “remix” other people’s work. In the case of the Feminist Chatbot course, the tutors had set up a project you could use as a starter. Being able to see in real time what changing different elements did (Glitch allows a live preview of your code) made it so much easier to grasp the rules. Pulling levers in something that’s already built rather than having to hold all of your own scaffolding in your mind makes those rules so much more tangible. Seeing something come together quickly gave me the confidence to challenge and expand what was already there, eventually building my own.

The chatbot I built is a toolkit to support my speculative project Imagining Future Space. It’s a starting place for resources about futures design and exercises to get people’s creative juices going, whether they need to warm up before starting one of the questions, want an extra challenge, or are just interested in exploring more. Just like the rest of Imagining Future Space, my plan is to expand the chatbot as the project grows and I learn more. 

If you have the chance I’d highly recommend getting involved in some courses outside of your comfort zone. I’m looking forward to learning more about conversational design and using glitch to expand my coding skill set, now I’ve got access to the resources and the confidence to try it out.

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It’s no secret that portraits are some of my favourite things to draw. This blog really saw the start of what I would consider my current portrait style. In the past, I’ve enjoyed and learned a lot from breaking down how I make things, whether that’s a deep dive into composition or patterns. But I’ve never really shown the process I take when making a portrait, until today.

Recently I worked with The Browser, a writing and podcast recommendation service, to do a set of portraits of the brilliant people who work there (and me as their casual resident illustrator) for their site. We took inspiration from a portrait I made for social media of Michelle Obama that’s still one of my favourites. 

In a rare stroke of luck I realised I had kept all of layers of that illustration so I could break down how the final piece came about. So let’s jump right into the stages I go through to make a tonal or full colour portrait.

  1. I always start by gathering images. If I’m working with a client I’ll get them to send me a few over. Otherwise I’ll search google for a range that I like. I try to get more than I need so that I can take elements from a few images and bring them together. I have to be honest and say the image I used for the main reference for this image wasn’t in my original file and I couldn’t find it, but these are the side references I used.
  2. Then I like to do a rough sketch, often in a light colour or shade of grey, to give me a structure and an outline. In cases where I have to be really accurate to a specific image I might trace this first rough to help structure the outline. 
  3. Once I’ve got a rough outline. I’ll then use that as a base layer and start to add detail on top. I typically choose a finer more pressure sensitive brush to add these details in. I will almost always start with the eyes and eye brows, then move onto the shape of the face, leaving the nose and mouth to last (I usually find these the hardest). 
  4. I’ll flick the base layer off and on as I go, and typically do some final refinements when the rough lines are removed because having a base can distort how you see an image,
  5. When I’m adding colour to a portrait I decide the palette upfront. In this case I wanted something tonal. I really liked the light pink I had used for the rough draft, so I took that as a base to build up a range of shades.
  6. To colour the portrait I decided to use broader strokes than I normally would to make it feel loose and more gestural. I stated with the darkest tones then worked lighter leaving some sections of white as a highlight. For The Browser portraits I used a similar process but a slightly neater style.
  7. All that was left to do was clean up the image and refine the colouring. That’s how I got to the final image. 
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I’m someone who’s particularly given to finding and sticking to a routine, so it’s no surprise that my life in lockdown already has a well worn cadence. It’s a comforting pattern of running, working, cooking, reading, watching Netflix, and reading. I’m glad of my routine. Routine offers a safety net and a sense of regular time, both of which seem to have been lost to the shrinking of my daily life to the same four walls. 

But I have to admit that the comfort of that pattern has become a very softly padded creative prison. I’m really struggling to find new ideas and break out of old styles.

The power of this blog for me lies in the fact that it’s a space to unpick the everyday and understand more about how what’s around us can hold beauty and has been/can be designed to be better. So, I decided to revisit a couple of older posts, including one on taking idea adventures, and decided to set myself a challenge. 

On Wednesday 24th June, I had to take time every hour for twelve hours 8am-8pm (roughly) to find something that could inspire me and illustrate it. It was a challenge to stop and look outside of my normal routine and find unusual angles, everyday wonders, and little joys. 

While I didn’t quite make every hour in time, these are the twelve moments from what could have just been another day that made it something special.