Night to day

I was chatting with a friend the other day, and she told me that I do the best job with creative work when I oscillate between periods of public exposure and periods of privacy, between day and night. This tracks; it felt validating to hear from someone else. The broader arc of my career has involved making a thing, promoting & talking about the thing, going away for a couple of years, making another thing, rinse and repeat.

In doing so, I find myself working fundamentally the same problem from different angles. The fundamental question is: how do we make ourselves more conscious of design, both in manifestation and in practice? Whether I am coming at it from the perspective of a store, business, or UX issue, that’s it. That is the whole assignment.

Whenever the work comes out, I end up attracting different groups of people. Sometimes I disappoint those who favored my earlier work. But I also don’t know how else to exist within the practice, and I now have over 20 years of evidence for how to do it.

This process does not fit normal capitalistic structure or the way that society typically works. There is an expectation that once you’ve done something, you must quickly follow it with your next thing. Treadmills & hamster wheels are referenced. Nowhere is it discussed that the hamster is imprisoned. I suppose we all know.