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I survived Inktober, well Peachtober.

This month I created 31 pieces for the 31 days of the month. This was the first time I’ve ever tried a drawing challenge like this before. In the past, I’d either realised that it was inktober on the 12th of the month and decided it was too late or psyched myself out because I thought I couldn’t make work that was good enough. But after a long while of feeling quite stagnant in my work and seeing Sha’an’s approach to the challenge for the past few years, she’s tried out new materials and styles to improve her work, I decided to give it a go.

I followed the #peachtober20 prompts that Sha’an put together, they’re designed to be quite literal and easy to visualise which I appreciated. But I also wanted to use this as a chance to try something different. So I decided that for every prompt I would do a study of a piece of art history, using the vast array of works available online from galleries like The Met and The National Gallery. That meant I was just focused on drawing and drawing in new inspiration. Then to further differentiate this month from my usual work, I decided to focus on sketchier pieces with texture and more shading.

I followed those rules and made 31 pieces. I have to say I started a little before October so I could build up a little buffer of sorts to ensure I kept posting even if I had bad days, but I did pretty much draw something every day for the month (except for Sundays).

This is my month’s work.

Throughout the month I kept a little log of all of the challenges, my favourite pieces and things I wanted to continue after October and I wanted to share a few reflections more publicly. So here are 5 things I learned doing my first drawing challenge.

Just drawing was fun but that doesn’t mean it’s not hard

I really enjoyed just getting to work from other people’s pre-perfected compositions and focus on the skill of drawing. My illustration work is usually really focused on telling a story/making a point so I spend as much energy on the idea as the execution. But because this was all execution based I put way more time into details that I skip in my own work. 

Give into the prompts

Through the prompts Sha’an shared, I drew things I never would have thought to try on my own. It was so fun to just give over control and get inspired through a constraint. When it comes to personal work I usually have to come up with my own constraints and I haven’t had as clear a defined set of parameters for drawing since I was doing GCSE/IB art projects which had to respond to a theme.

I actually quite like texture

After years of very simple, flat line based drawings it was a bit of a surprise to see how much I liked working with texture and that I could even create something different. It was new but it still looked like my work, at least I think it did.

There needs to be more negative space in my work

Some of the pieces I liked the most were the ones with lots of darker areas and negative space. I want to take that away from this piece of work and bring it into work going forward.

You can do all the social things right and still not see results

Weirdly, I think the biggest lesson I learned wasn’t about my drawing but about Instagram. This month I think I did everything that you’re meant to do: I posted regularly, I had a consistent theme, I had interesting captions, I used an active hashtag, I engaged with other people using the hashtag, I made good stuff. But I lost followers. My engagement continued to be in the gutter. I’d already been trying to separate my work from its social reception but now I know I have to do that when it comes to Instagram.

Overall, inktober/peachtober was more exhausting than I had imagined and I thought it was going to be a tough slog. I was so burned out from drawing more detailed pieces that by the last week I couldn’t face doing more than finishing the last couple of posts when it came to illustration. Despite that I got so much out of doing it. I created work I never would have done without the prompts and made things I’m really proud of. 

Will I do it again? That’s a question for next October.

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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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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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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. 

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Earlier this year, back when we could travel and be in rooms with other people I went to (and spoke at!) Service Design in Government Conference. I had an incredible time, and left feeling more determined and inspired than I’d felt in a long while.  There was something in the idea of taking a step back and consequence scanning what we do, to ensure the impacts of our work butterfly out positively. There was also something in hearing about the personal work, and provocations, people had felt compelled to undertake whether that was baking cake or creating environmental service standards.

I knew I wanted to commit to doing more meaningful personal work and reconnect with the manifesto I wrote for my work when I turned 26, because as much as I’d always believed in those values I hadn’t been actively living them.

Imagining Future Spaces is my first attempt at a first attempt at that.

Imagining Future Spaces was an idea I had in response to two moments. The first was a talk by the incredible Cassie Robinson where she asked “what has happened to our imaginations?” and advocated for social dreaming. The second was a series of conversations I had with friends and loved ones while we were on the brink of COVID-19 where despite seeing the effects take hold elsewhere, we couldn’t describe what impact a lockdown would have on our days let alone what a life post-pandemic might be like.

There are likely hundreds of complex and interwoven reasons why our imaginations appear to be weakening, or at least appear to be able to imagine themselves out of the status quo in anything other than a dystopian horror. 

But one thing I have always believed to be true is that you can get better at anything if you commit to practising. So I thought I’d put my skills as a researcher and illustrator (AKA I like questions and weird juxtapositions) to use and create a space to practise. 

That’s where the 52 questions that make up Imagining Future Space came from. There’s one for every day of the year or card in a deck. There are just enough to create sustained practise and or a space for play. 

Learning from the questions posed by Aron, Melinat, Aron, Vallone and Bator in The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness, better known as the 36 Questions that lead to love, these questions get more personal and more abstract as they go. They’re designed to be a challenge. They cover small tactile things like what’s in your pockets, to more social questions about our relationships as well as bigger questions about how we’ll stay fed and healthy. I tried to make sure I asked about a wide range of subject and kept the questions as open to a wide range of responses as I could. But they do only offer imaginary snapshots of what alternative worlds could look and feel like. In order to truly imagine and design sustainable new worlds, we need to think in systems, but that’s a challenge bigger than today.

Each question comes with a random set of three conditions (some realistic, some silly)  to challenge your imagination but also take away the fear of a blank page. The “in world where” offers some environmental, social and value based context that hopefully offers just enough of a push out of the everyday to lead people to think about alternative possibilities. 

There were moments where it felt self-indulgent to start a project like this. Who am I to create and curate a space like this? But after a while I reconciled myself with that feeling, imagining the future is work for everyone. Even if it is self-indulgent, I learned a lot making it and I think I’m going to continue to learn a lot through using it.

Whether it was writing the questions, creating 54 illustrations that were aimed to inspire fun and lateral thinking in responses, or building the site in wordpress, reviving my tiny bit of coding knowledge, putting the thing together reaffirmed to me that this is the kind of personal work I want to be making. The complexity of the project challenged me in a way I haven’t challenged myself in a while.

The first launch of the site is only a starting point though. I’ll be adding more creative thinking tools to try to make the process as supported as possible. I also want to draw on my anthropology studies at Goldsmiths and add some context to each question to show how different societies are currently creating their own alternative worlds whether that’s through how they organise themselves, their environments or their values.

Over the next year I will be trying to create my own responses to each of the questions. I’ll be challenging myself to think of what’s possible, not just what’s probable or plausible. 

I’m hoping other people join me and share their ideas for what alternative worlds might be. They might discuss, draw or describe whatever it is they’re imagining, because the more you make your ideas tangible, the easier it is to start to speculate about and imagine more complex alternatives like what new ways of life might be like. 

Imagining and creating the future needs us all to get involved.

I’d like to imagine a world where we can develop stronger imaginations together and through doing so gain confidence in our own potential and the potential for alternative worlds to exist.  

I’d like to imagine a world where perhaps we might even get to take that belief back into the present and push for positive changes to the world we’re in and shaping all of the time. 

I’d like to imagine a world where fingers crossed there will be ice cream too.