January 29, 2021

Weeknotes 5: Infrastructure Week

Welcome to the fifth weeknote (reminder: weeknotes are intentional moments of reflection), and the first time we are putting this out over email. Yes, I guess everyone will have an email/substack/whatever for the next 15 minutes. I can’t resist, I’m within the event horizon. These updates used to just live on the website (and will continue to do so),  but we live in a multichannel world, and I’m a Barbie Girl.

Speaking of last century pop culture, It has been exciting to work with old friends the last few weeks on some projects we can’t yet speak about. But I can’t get the A-Team reference out of my head, as we are coming together to work cooperatively on tough problems. Maybe I’ll just lean into it by listening to 10 hours of the A-Team Theme Song.

I published another interview for Typology City – my project focused on urban typologies, especially the tiny bits of urbanity which we connect with on the street. I spoke with Mari Kroin about her student work, Wet Paint: A Study of Subway Columns. Please read the whole interview.

Interesting conversations had:

Spoke with the managing director of a huge management consultancy, where we traded leadership styles, prompting us to remember the Six Emotional Leadership Styles (PDF) by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee

Spoke with a friend-of-friend who used to work in government as a designer, who reminded me that organizational structure eats culture, and to be clear what kind of future we want to create is baked into the org structure.

Friend who is a head of innovation in a US county reminds me that enablement is more authentic than empowerment (can I really empower you?) and passes on this link: Enablement: how governments can achieve more by letting go

On Tap for Next Week

Getting deeper into content around cities and housing typologies. 

Journeys with purpose 

Engagement in the news

New Journey Opportunities

These are links to job openings collected from friends, and friends-of-friends, which might be interesting in your journey

News from Expedition Works

This week was all about writing proposals, continuing the arduous work of company formation (wow, how many of the same forms do I really need to fill out). Basically everything that every business needs to do to be legal. I’m swimming in acronyms, but breaking apart the tasks into smaller chunks and distributing it across the week allows me to not feel like I’m drowning in paperwork.

We love mail. If you have any feedback or links you can leave it in this google form, which is anonymous by default. We won’t sell your info. That’s gross. 

January 4, 2021

Public Sector Domain Page

Building out this website, I realized that I might need some domain-specific pages which can tell a more coherent, or organized, story which a single project might not be able to tell.

The first domain page I focused on shipping is the Public Sector Domain Page, with additional pages focused on digital product and user experience. I hope to iterate and update these pages as my storytelling evolves.