now (july 2022)
Amsterdam, Netherlands
The now page is simply a place to point people who wonder what I'm up to now.
2022 is better than 2021, and 2021 was better than 2020. The lockdowns - please god let me be right in saying this - seem to be over. Monkeypox and climate change and war in Ukraine are in, covid is boring and we’re demonstrably living through the end times, but also - each day is mostly nice.
full time freelance - EU style
I made the big jump and quit my big-compromise job in the Netherlands and switched my residence from sponsored-by-a-company to self-employed. Gave up a lucrative 30% tax-free benefit, but gained an airport-hangar sized amount of mental lightness. So far I’m earning more, working more, feeling more like myself again. Being in the EU has opened up a world of opportunities that weren’t available in far-away-from-everything Sydney.
I love being able to play the timezone game and work with US companies - I’m free from meetings all day until 4pm. You get so much done when the day isn’t broken up with meetings. Most of my free time is during the day when the sun is out. Highly optimal.
youth sports in america
Working mostly with GameChanger. Learning a lot about baseball, of all things. Working with a small, really smart design team. Running discovery research again. Including engineers in user research again. Doing real design work and feeling good about it.
mentoring
I’m mentoring students on DesignLab. I get to talk to them about design and research and get excited together, and it’s a good course. I also get paid several hundred dollars of absolutely giddying fun money per month direct into my PayPal - which is some kind of perfect example of cognitive bias, because I could of course just put that amount into a bank account and call it fun money and it would be exactly 0% as fun.
NFTs, AIs, speculators, scams
I got really curious about NFTs, which took me into the world of AI generated art, and a deep dive into Midjourney and DALL-E and others. Saw it go from underground to a huge craze to boring and overdone in the space of two months. I’m so curious about how we can use AI to boost ourselves as designers. If I did any design work that was purely visual (posters? book covers?) I think I’d use AI as an idea generating tool. As it is, I can’t see much value yet to UX. But it moves so fast. I’d like to stay ahead of it.
Oh, and on NFTs - where I landed is they’re a short term speculator’s game. In general my investment strategy is boring and long term, so it’s not for me.
the power of routine
Every morning, I wake up. I make the bed. Make a protein shake. Do a 10-minute workout. Fill up all my water bottles. Take my vitamins. Make a coffee (iced, one pump of vanilla syrup). Go to my computer and write ±750 words of stream-of-consciousness reflection and planning, a la The Artists Way. I plan out my day. Then I start doing some work.
I can not overstate how mundanely revolutionary this has been.
amsterdam in the summer 💖
It’s a whole different world in summer. Winter Amsterdam can bite me and I may never stay a whole winter ever again, but in summer it’s just so aggressively charming it must be a joke. We call it Disneyland. It’s a fake city, surely, over-designed for our pleasure. Surely all these attractive people on bikes carrying flowers over 17th century bridges are hired actors. Surely these colourful, leaning, canal-front houses are just facades and there’s a Westfield mall behind there. Everyone asks where I’m going for summer, but I can’t think about going away at all.
will I buy an apartment?
I want to buy a cute ground floor apartment with one to two bedrooms and a little outdoor patch of dirt and wooden floors and a park nearby and only have my own nice things in it. 2023…?