Today I noticed that I get better at saying “Good, how are you?” It doesn’t freak me out anymore. I stopped thinking “Wait, Lisa, go deep inside yourself and ask you: How are you? For real?” Now I don’t think anymore and just respond immediately….and now the challenge is a) to say it as fast as possible with still being understandable, and b) asking “How are you?” first. Before the other one does. Baby steps, Lisa. Baby steps.
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Yeah, I didn’t start the blog post with the usual “Good day today!”, because I’m still not sure what I think about that day. This morning I felt unproductive and was in a mini-existential crisis. Because of that, I started a great email conversation with Matt Daniels from Polygraph (greeeeeat website), who helped me getting out of it before it really started.
The crisis was about the question: “Am I allowed to do data vis (or anything, really) if it doesn’t have any impact and doesn’t make the world a better place?”. The whole question had been in my head for a long time. Because of that question, I wrote blog articles dissing self-tracking, I had great conversations with advocacy people in New York in January and I had a conversation with Nicolas Felton last week. And today with Matt. And Matt kind of resolved the whole thing for me with saying:
*“I’d argue that every project that I’ve done has had impact – it just depends on how you qualify “impact.” Take the rapper vocab project for example: Teachers have used it as a way to engage students in math/literature, grounded in something kids care about. Numerous people have emailed me that they were inspired to pursue coding, design, and data viz via that project. It’s been used to legitimize hip hop, which is widely marginalized in the realm of intellectual culture.” *
For me, that was mind blowing. It doesn’t just state that “impact” is a very, very blurry concept…every concept is blurry. However, it also implies that you can’t always foresee what the positive consequences will be – but you can trust people to USE your work for their goals. These goals might be not your top priorities (“engage students in math”), but it’s THEIR first priority. It means that people can use and interpret you work in different ways. I can see something in a different way than the artist intended, and it can still be extremely valuable for me. And such an artwork could have a huge impact on me.
Then I thought about the things that I would do with this new gained “freedom”. And then I did the chart at the top. It doesn’t change the world. But personally, I found it very, very interesting. I wrote down the thing I want to create:
Basically, I want to create something beautiful and worldview-challenging. In practice, that won’t change SO much. I will still do the same stuff. But I will feel better while doing so. I won’t feel guilty.
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Also, big highlight of the day: Having a call with the other OpenNews Fellow! (Except Christine. Sigh.) It’s great to know that whatever could or will happen, I’m not the only one being on this journey. These other fellows are amazing and I’m super grateful to know each of them.
Input? 7
Output? 8
Learnings?
Ten times more people would live in the US if it had India’s population density. Also, China, Canada and the US all have roughly the same size. And China has four times more people in that space than the US.
Impact is hard to measure. And beauty is a legit goal.
Questions?
Having these “new” goals: What do I want to learn in the next months?