ux | work | life matters

Day 326 | Using our skills to make a difference

I want to make a difference in this world. Help it be a better place. There are many ways to do this, both in our everyday lives through simple small things like smiling rather than grunting, or paying a stranger a compliment, but also through putting our skills to use.

The longer I work in this field the more fortunate I feel. It’s a far stretch from my dream as a kid to work as a vet, but as someone told me had I chosen that career path I’d spend a lot of my time putting sick animals to sleep. I have no doubt that being a vet would be incredibly rewarding and, people person as I am, I do sometimes wonder what I’m doing spending so much of my working time in an office in front of a computer. But then I remember this quote by Wilson Minor and I feel a bit more inspired:

Design is the choices we make about the world we want to live in.
We make our world what it is and we become the kind of people who live in it.
What do we want to spend more time with? What do we want to shape us? What nourishes us? What do we want to see grow?
You know what we get to do when we leave here? We get to go make things.
Things that nudge the world a little bit in what we hope is the right direction.
We get to put a dent in the universe.
This is a great job.

– Wilson Miner in his talk When we build

We live in an incredibly interesting time where technology is really shaping our lives. In our profession we are right there in the middle of it, helping shape things and making the future that we will all live in. There are so many ways in which we can make the world a better place and putting the skills that we have, and enjoy using, to good use is a really good start.

Tomorrow – Day 327 | Scratches & marks tells a story

Image source: The picture is from when we started trying out paint for project flat and I’d painted a sample, left it for a min to clean the brush and during that time the spotty one got involved

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