Weeknotes 2024 W21 W22

It‘s a combined weeknotes as the routine for the last 2 weeks has been turned upside down mostly because of the bank holiday weekend and the school half term.

Here’s are some of my highlights.

• I had a wonderful walk around Lewes and neighbouring villages with a good friend. It was really refreshing to address some really important topics with someone with an entirely different lived experience as me.
• I arrived home in time to attend The Steps Collective online event facilitated by Andy Thornton and John Willshire. I really enjoyed Adam Chmielowski and ​Ellen De Vries’s talks on the language we use in business and how it relates to the regenerative space.
• One of my key takeaways from Ellen’s talk was about the importance of place. It sparked a thought about my own practice and how important conducting research is with people face-to-face in their own context.
• Leaning into this thought and the topic of regenerative practice, I spent most of the first weekend in the garden relocating a set of raised beds. It was refreshing to get away from the screen and familiarise myself with my own small patch of wilderness, digging out the beds, sorting dead root material from soil: an information architecture of nature.
• I finally planted out some seeds. I’m very late this but the weather has been so unpredictable that I’m not sure whether following the guides or not makes any difference. Several seeds have sprouted, though I’m losing a lot to slugs.
• May’s Grand Sumo wrapped up and I finally completed my sumo bingo card adding some extra bits of data, some visual design and some responsiveness for horizontal and vertical viewports. It’s not perfect but it’ll do for now.
• I really enjoyed the d.MBA webinar hosted by Tom Prior. His guest Pablo Stanley gave the engaging and highly entertaining talk Ups and Downs of Design Entrepreneurship: The Dunning-Kruger Effect in Design. I really admire the honesty in Pablo’s content. He laid bare the failures of his own practice and experience, something you don’t often see in the industry and certainly not at his level of confidence. He made a good point about harnessing the naiveness of our confidence at ‘mount stupid’: if we were to know the entirety of a problem’s complexity we might never try to solve said problem.
• I had more conversations about an IndieWeb zine. I have a few print stylesheet explorations to try out next week.
• I’m the proud owner of a standing desk… well a frame at least. I’m a table top and assembly away from a happy work station.
• I found out IndieWeb Carnival on the last day of May. The window to contribute to the monthly blogging theme of Creative environments was only hours away but I managed to submit something in time. Coincidentally, I had drafted a blog post on the topic of creativity during my morning’s swim, so I had the idea floating around in my head. I love moments of serendipity like this. I’m already getting excited about June’s carnival.
• A batch of kimchi is fermenting in the kitchen. Only time will tell if I got the portions correct.

Right, off to make a curry.