Week 26 - Small Wins
Making it to the p5.js showcase, thoughts on living life week-to-week, making to avoid ambiguity, progress on my website, experiments with music, visualising life (& death) and some front end tools.
I had a wonderful week up until today and had planned to write about some really interesting things. However, because of some personal troubles, I found it extremely difficult to get up, sit down at my desk and write today.
This may not be the most polished article but I do not want to deviate from my weekly discipline. I would like to be robotic if that’s what it takes.
So, here’s week 26 – a week where I had a couple of small wins, interesting realisations and a lot of growth & development.
[Thoughts] How to live life without living in endless expectation.
I wonder why we’ve chosen to live life in 7-day brackets.
Every Monday, you find yourself fuelled with the motivation to get you till Friday. On Saturday, you find yourself in a mad race to catch up with life and to regain that motivation that you so desperately desire on Monday.
And that’s it: a loop of five days of burn & two days to replenish, repeated 52 times to form your entire year. What I despise is the 6th day at the end of every week, that Saturday morning when you wake up and involuntarily enter a reflective state of mind. You find yourself in a desperate search for accomplishment, i.e 52 moments in a year to feel like you did not just waste your time.
What we miss out is that our time is stretched out over the course of our lives, definitely not adhering to a 7-day bracket. God forbid if you wake up on a Friday and have nothing to celebrate for the 5 days that have just gone by. It’s a terribly misleading feeling and I find myself in a perpetual state of it.
On Friday night, I found myself in the p5.js 2022 Showcase curated by Annie Zheng. There were 2 selected entries from India and one was my graduation project that I had developed in July 2022.
As someone who was fascinated by computation and never formally trained in it (I was actually barred from taking computer science in high school because the teacher thought I wouldn’t pass), finding my project on this permanent showcase was a very big achievement for me. Ever since I made the web game, I’ve never really been able to gauge how to feel about it and the project almost always felt too weak. Making it on a global showcase for the programming environment that I built it in, definitely helps reduce my worry. It was something and it wasn’t all too bad.
There are rare moments in my life when I feel any sense of achievement. This is definitely one of them. What I realised in this entire process was how life is never going to fit inside your 7-day bracket. You will reap the rewards of what you sow but not quite in a foreseeable manner.
A good way to live might just be to do things that you can do without expecting rewards in return. If you can find things that you love doing, simply because you love doing them, those seem to be fulfilling pursuits awaiting your devotion.
[Experiences] Want clarity? Make the damn thing.
This week has been interesting on the work front. We’ve been working towards developing a chatbot for adolescents in India to access information and were struggling to understand just how to conduct desirability testing for all of our ideas.
I had anchored myself to the Wizard of Oz testing method and spent a lot of my time crafting elaborate flows that would funnel testing participants into features that we wanted to test, without removing the possibility of choices.
This past week, we conducted an internal test with some of our co-workers. We quickly realised how complicated it was to actually run the test. Although the flow worked perfectly, the testing was diluted and a little bit of patience had to be exercised by the human being acting like the chatbot; which is contrasting to how a chatbot should react.
Immediately after, the 3 of us on the team fell into a quick discussion where everyone bounced around ideas. I held my head in my frustration.
We could have tested these prototypes in a bunch of different ways; a works-like-feels-like model, a show & tell method, card sorting, co-ideation, etc. In design, while making choices, you will always have a bunch of different ways that you could have gone in but you have to pick one.
I arrived at the Wizard of Oz model by making it, by developing it and refining it little by little. The best way to choose from a list of options is by making quick prototypes for different methods and then seeing which one would work best in that testing scenario.
What I’ve realised is that very often, we tend to solve design in our heads. I do too. Here’s an obvious solution and you present it nonchalantly and walk away. It is when someone gets their hands dirty with the work that they realise why that method probably won’t work.
Talk is cheap. Make more, talk less.
[Progress] Little by little
I have made a lot of progress on my personal website. Every day, I manage to fix a tiny thing or two and it results in disproportionate pleasure.
For starters, I’ve managed to make my entire landing page completely responsive by using a flexbox.
Then, I also created a responsive image gallery for my type archive.
I think I would like to arrange the images in an asymmetric grid but haven’t been able to figure out the perfect mobile replica of a grid like that. The screen space is too little.
Maybe it’ll be a grid on the computer but a single column gallery on a phone. Early days but interesting area to explore.
Every day, I get a little bit closer to developing my entire portfolio from scratch. At the end of it all, I wouldn’t have to pay a single penny to keep my website on the internet and that, for me, is so liberating. No being tied down to a platform’s limitations, absolute control over your presence on the internet; almost a permanent place of mine on the grand web.
[Cool Projects] How many weeks until you die?
I found this to be a very uniquely positioned project.
FailFlow came up with an idea to visualise where a person is in their expected 91 year timeline.
You also see different things that other people had achieved by a particular age which, I can guarantee, might spiral you down an existential hole.
They’ve tied it to a bunch of daily reminders and some other gimmicks that you can check out if you’d like. What I found interesting was how I had only lived about a quarter of my life. All those empty weeks, all that space for so much more. Weirdly enough, I had been starting to wonder just how much different life was going to be in the future.
When I saw myself not even covering 1/4th of an average timeline, I had more space to expect new things than I had before. I await the surprise of life.
[Resources] Front-end tools of 2022
A fascinating list of front-end development tools put together by Louis Lazaris at Smashing Magazine.
I got so fascinated with them that I opened almost 20 of them and realised that I need to take things simple for creating my website. Build it little by little, and not rush to add every new exciting thing that I see on the internet.
It’s a game of patience now.
[Quote] A quote that I liked while watching ‘Break Point’.
"If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same."
[Experiments] Playing with music
Lately, I’ve been fascinated with the idea of letting the computer create music.
I studied a little bit about scales, notes, beats, rhythm & tempo and wondered what would happen if we subject it to computational randomness. The results are promising but I think I respect musicians a lot more now. It isn’t as easy as putting a bunch of notes on top of a nice tempo, or creating the right rhythm. There’s so much more to the art of making music and I think I’m going to continually wonder whether the computer, in a primitive manner, can pick and choose a bunch of notes which sound like pleasing melodies.
I can’t wait to explore more.