The exhaustion of being alone
I feel it acutely right now, so I am taking a day off to knit and to write down my progress.
We have established that design is not a thing we do here in the North-East of Germany. None of my competencies are in demand where I am and I am feeling the resistance, because I am too far ahead of my time. This has been the story of my life, now I am officially in that position.
I am still trying to make my time there count, I have faith that what I know counts, and I am starting to experience some appreciation from further afield, both physically and organisationally, but still. It is a walk on a knife’s edge to manage to recover physically and emotionally each week.
So here is the progress I can see.
I have moved around wildly within the confines of my job to test where I can make a specific contribution. I have specified three areas: Creating concepts for and running projects that make the company visible to the outside world so we can tell positive and interesting stories, finding ways to make design thinking relevant and running projects to show that, and making the subject of community (as opposed to team) and asynchronous communication relevant and running a project to grow internal competencies on that.
Stories
I have a network within the Rostock museum scene and the German industrial and arts heritage scene, so I have managed to do a few projects entirely without additional resources. We are finalising a project I started with the local maritime museum where our modules will be in their model port. Even our first and only offshore turbine will be standing there, with blades turning. I have also started a sponsorship deal with the Kunsthalle, the local gallery of modern art, and gotten a museum to lend us glass cabinets for our new visitor centre. Local contacts have given us books, a small collection of artefacts from history and even technical drawings of wind turbines and pumps from 1949.
These projects are complete or near complete, I have also created some bigger concepts that would require more resources. I am working on pitching those, I just found out we have a new project manager, so that requires starting from scratch. But that has never stopped me from trying.
Design Thinking
I am consistently the only person in the room with competencies in UX Design. When we are developing a new process, I am the only person who will say that it is important that not only we in the room know that this is a prototype, but also the people working with it. I now see that because of my pushing for the users to be actively asked for feedback, there are sheets hanging on walls with email addresses of who to direct feedback to. It is better, but it still isn’t user research. And it especially doesn’t make sense when the users aren’t having access to email.
I am experiencing very active and very personal resistance to my approach from the current advisers, in a way that takes away my faith of having anything of value to contribute.
But I have gone up a level and am having good conversations there. I am starting to be in demand for conversations, but instead, my strategy there is to get everyone who listens to me to take the free Google UX Design Course, at least at the Foundation level. That is a very good course and ensures I am not wasting my time. I can do that, since I don’t earn from each extra hour I am spending on this.
I have also made contact with the professor at our local uni who teaches UX Design (as a voluntary course for IT students.) We will try to make it look more relevant together. I am not alone, after all.
Community and Asynchronous Communication
That is the most exciting development right now. I am making progress and gaining clarity on what it is I can contribute in this area. I am doing a series of videos on my history with community and have a good plan to grow my competencies in making what I know relevant. I brought in a colleague who has run some sessions to show each member of a team the urgency to do something differently. Those sessions are now starting to be in demand.
So the plan there is to learn really well how to do it, document how I do it, build a prototype, test it more and then have a product that makes sense. And we can even use this to show how Design works.
The Office
The office is a hard place for me to be right now. I am trying to understand what is going on with people, and because people don’t share what is going on with them, I need to somehow grasp it with empathy. Which is only considered a normal female thing to be doing so isn’t recognised. I mean it works, I am at least still there and mostly having good relationships, but it also is work and takes a lot of energy.
Weirdly, I am still glad I did the work on being present and showing up.
After all, I am not alone. We all just think we are. Which is one of the problems we have, isn’t it? We do have positive voices around us, but they keep being drowned out by the negative ones. I think maybe that was what we got right in those early days of social media. We created a world of positive voices.
And in my last years with Anna, that’s what I had. Always a positive voice in a sea of negativity. She really was wonderful.
Anyways. I am ankeholst on Bluesky.
You’re definitely not alone. Here in IBM we’ve embraced Desigb Thinking (plus our own variation), and a lot of what you describe was a challenge at first. But eventually enough people
Get it and the domino’s topple. Design is built into everything. It even feels weird not to incorporate it, so keep going. You’re heading in the right direction.