Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko.
I sometimes have a sense that I did my best work as a teenager, working on graphical design and making brochure type websites for companies owned by people among friends and relatives. I would be designing websites in Macromedia Fireworks, and sometimes Flash, and Dreamweaver. I would absolutely love experimenting with new design concepts, color combinations, patterns, imagery etc etc. When not at the computer, I would walk around dreaming up new designs, experiences and “feelings”, not to mention solutions to how to combine something beautiful with great functionality.
I’m still pretty proud of much of the work from this time (here, and below, is one example - check different version over time if you like), and am still quite surprised at the amount of creativity and focus one could have at that time, and am from time to time thinking about why I have a hard time experiencing the same today.
When I think back, I think I can spot a few things that might have contributed to it.
First, this was before mobile phones and the constant stream of just slightly relevant content filling up our brains with mostly non-actionable content, when not just appending to our never ending “read later” lists.
But there is something more to it. And I think that is the incredible familiarity with the tools I had developed.
And this I think in part might have been due to the nature of those tools. They were relatively user-friendly, graphical tools that did their job without an abundance of extraneous complexity. This enabled me as a non-coder at 15 years old to become very proficient with using them. The graphical nature of the tools also enabled a very rapid feedback cycle. One could see immediately what the output looked like.
The feeling was that of a sculptor forming clay with his/her hands. I could work directly with the medium.
Some twentyfive years later, I have moved into more of non-graphical software development, bioinformatics, pipeline development et cetera. All code, with little graphical output.
As I’m now from time to time struggling to find focus and the same level of joy in my work, I’m starting to think about how the qualities of my work as a teenager might be possible to achieve in my current work.
I don’t yet know how this can happen, but I think I’m pretty sure it will involve some of the following:
Immediate feedback - Somehow “seeing” and “sensing” what you are forming
Extreme avoidance of non-essential complexity
Extended periods of total focus
An interesting thing is that I notice how these points did feed into each other, in my younger years.
The immediate feedback made it much easier to focus totally. And conversely, the full focus enabled building up a deep mental image of what one was building such that even parts that were less visible, such as HTML code or various dynamic aspects of the website was something one could relentlessly explore in my mind, both when working and when not.
I think we need to do much more to be able to work like sculptors when creating, regardless if the outcome is something concrete like a graphical design, or something a bit more abstract like a system architecture or algorithm.
Do you have similar experiences? Have you found ways to achieve the same level of flow today?
// Samuel