A Case Against Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneur: a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk.

We are a nation whose very existence is a direct result of entrepreneurship. Settlers sacrificed old beliefs and rules in pursuit of new possibilities, at great personal risk, and instilled in the DNA of our country a uniquely American entrepreneurial spirit that inspired Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Steve Jobs to change the world with the power of their ideas.  

The concept of entrepreneurship has been diluted from the time of the first settlers, however, to describe anyone who single-mindedly pursues an idea for capital gain. We live in a time when memes like “Do what you love, and money will follow” and "Change the world" become mantras upon which global brands are built. This in itself is not necessarily a bad thing: the self-motivated, idea-powered Silicon Valley model bypasses the bloated and highly regulated processes in place in the public and corporate sectors, allowing a good and profitable idea to be available to the masses in its purest form in a relatively short amount of time, and now we can push a button when we're almost out of toilet paper and a new case will be delivered to our doorstep in an hour. Companies that have succeeded in this way are often inextricably linked with their creators — Google, Amazon, Tesla, and Facebook are obvious examples — who, with equal parts ingenuity and charisma, have reached in a matter of a few years a nearly unimaginable and certainly unprecedented level of personal and financial success. 

Entrepreneurialism permeates every stage of our lives: we encourage our children to turn hobbies into small businesses, students learn how to write business plans before research papers, innovators shroud their ideas in secrecy and legal protection instead of collaborating. This comes at a societal cost: valuing the success of one over the benefit of many often results in the poisoning of noble causes with hubris.   

In 2003, Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford to found Theranos, a medical laboratory that streamlines and standardizes blood tests using proprietary technology. She assembled an impressive but strikingly non-scientific advisory board that included Henry Kissinger, and by 2014 the estimated value of the company was over $9 billion.  By 2015, however, the opacity of Theranos’s practices started to draw attention, and the JAMA noted that though Theranos had been featured prominently in the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Business Insider, and Fortune, information about its technologies had not appeared in a single peer-reviewed biomedical publication. Upon further scrutiny by the FDA, Theranos failed several lab inspections, the certification for its California lab was revoked, and Holmes’s net worth plummeted overnight to $0. 

While we have no way of knowing if this story would have ended differently if Holmes had been more transparent and collaborative about Theranos’s procedures, the possibility exists that if she had shared early test results with peer-reviewed journals and relied on sound science rather than her own celebrity to build her company, the world could have seen a revolution in diagnostic testing, improving the lives of millions of people. How did so many respected journalists miss the fact that the technology Theranos used was unproven and all but unknown to the scientific community? Because they were distracted by the spectacular entrepreneurial success story of its founder. But even before Holmes became a media sensation, what was critically absent from her company wasn’t more regulation, or transparency, or sound science. It was empathy. Holmes's vision of inexpensive, painless diagnostic testing wasn't intended, at core, to solve a health crisis. If it was, Theranos would have populated its board with experts in science, healthcare,  and public policy. Instead, it simply aimed to bypass decades of research and disrupt for the sake of disruption. 

If to be an entrepreneur is to take on great personal risk in order to succeed, to be a leader is to take on great personal risk in providing opportunities for others to succeed. This takes time, understanding, compromise, and humility, none of which make compelling news stories. Entrepreneurship is meteoric; leadership is incremental. If serving the greater good were as enticing a prospect as a ten-figure IPO, city council meetings would be exhilarating. Aspirations of launching billion dollar tech startups would instead be dreams of advancing humanity through collective understanding. The increasing popularity of design thinking programs in schools across the country has the potential to inject humility and empathy into the way we think about innovation, if the term design thinking can get out of its own way and keep from becoming the kind of overhyped, short-lived trend it exists to prevent. 

In his 2016 commencement address to Howard University, Barack Obama described the fight against segregation as a long and difficult process that took 20 years of lawsuits and many, many people working together toward a common goal. But even by the time Thurgood Marshall finally brought Brown vs. the Board of Education to the Supreme Court, he knew the fight was just beginning, that it was slow and incremental, and would continue long after he was gone. That's because it was never about him. It was about collectively changing the rules for the benefit of everyone.

 "Better is good, because you consolidate your gains and then you move on to the next fight from a stronger position."
—Barack Obama

The qualities of an entrepreneur—ingenuity, fearlessness, charisma—are rare and admirable. But imagine if entrepreneurs were defined also as having empathy, patience, and humility. This would change how we define innovation, and push future entrepreneurs to develop solutions to problems that actually exist.

Making Sense of 2016

Over the last few days I’ve embarked on a completely non-scientific fact-finding mission—or rather, an opinion-finding mission—as both a participant and an observer, online and in person, with family, friends, acquaintances, and total strangers. Here’s what I learned:

1. The profession of journalism exploited social media and failed us, all of us, first by making it virtually impossible for Republican voters to learn about the policy proposals of any of Trump’s sixteen opponents, resulting in a nominee many voters found distasteful at best, viscerally revolting at worst; then, by suddenly taking an activist stance at the last possible second and demonizing and condescending to the very people they presented with this as their only option, resulting in what ultimately became a mass protest vote;

2. My small circle of black friends are generally staying out of the fray on this one, since neither group represented their best interests and they’ve been living with this reality for generations, plus they know that historically the only time they have a voice at the table is when white people say it’s ok;

3. The most threatening, toxic conversations I’ve had are the ones with people who voted for the same candidate I did, leading me to believe that many well-meaning Facebook groups and blog posts touting inclusion and acceptance are in fact practicing the opposite (moderators, take note);

4. Immigrant and refugee families are facing some real threats, because the perception exists that if there is even the slightest chance that a person with dangerous motivations somehow breaks through the immigration or refugee vetting process and does something horrible, it’s not worth it. Journalists should have done a better job of revealing the flaws in this logic—now we need to do everything we can to include these families and keep them safe;

5. We’re lumping people who simply disagree with us together with those who are actively and consciously spreading hate speech and encouraging and condoning violence. Failing to make the distinction is what got us here in the first place, and now Steve Bannon is in the White House. For those of you who don’t know, he’s in the second category.

So if I’ve ever condescended to you and made you feel like your opinion was less valuable than mine, I’m sorry. If I’ve taken on your cause as my own without fully understanding it or putting myself at any real risk, I’m sorry. If I was silent when I should have spoken up, or if I talked while I should have listened, I’m sorry. 

Please call me out on these things if you ever see me doing them (I’ll be visiting Pennsylvania in December, in case you want to do it in person). My goal for 2017 is to not be an asshole.

Thanks for listening.

Forget “Design Thinking,” Just Call it “Thinking”

Graphic designers often cite the advent of desktop publishing as the point at which our profession was forever cheapened, becoming overnight a job that could be done by anyone with a PC. We now come home fuming from a day spent trying to justify the cost of developing a custom font when Minion Pro will work just fine, gazing wistfully at the carefully arranged volumes of the design library we started in college, yearning to go back to the days of Paul Rand and Alexey Brodovitch when type was painstakingly set by a single pair of skilled hands and designers tossed around mysterious and exciting terms like "paste ups" and "seps."

While there are certainly downsides to making what was once a highly specialized skill set suddenly accessible to millions of people, our collective ire was misdirected. The problem with desktop publishing wasn't that everyone was suddenly a designer. The problem was that it redefined design as a product of desktop publishing. And we as designers were so busy having hurt feelings and worrying that we'd have to enroll in truck driving school that we simply allowed it to happen. Designers looked in vain for ways to differentiate ourselves from non-designers, and to restore perceived value to our wounded profession. We spoke out against spec work and student competitions, discussed (albeit briefly) requiring some sort of certification requirement for "real" designers, and lambasted online services that provided for-hire logos and pre-designed templates. In fact, in response to the desktop publishing revolution, we did the exact opposite of what designers are inherently good at: making things better.

The problem with desktop publishing wasn't that everyone was suddenly a designer. The problem was that it redefined design as a product of desktop publishing.

"Design" can't be taped to a wall. You don't send a client a PDF of a "design." You send a layout or a comp. Design is, and always has been, the method of questioning, brainstorming, testing, learning, creating, and understanding that comes before. It's the thinking, not the thing. Since the 1990s, we've been on a Sisyphean quest to restore the design profession to its former glory, when creative directors and CEOs formed partnerships that lasted decades, each understanding that the success of one meant the success of the other. Now it seems we've come full circle and have, arguably, entered into another golden age of design. Companies understand that design is a fundamental part of doing business, not a deliverable. Audiences are more discerning than ever, and expect products and services to fit their lives in a personal, tailored way. Design is being integrated seamlessly into all aspects of business strategy, and that's a very good thing. So why do we call it "design thinking?"

Design thinking refers to an iterative method of solution-based problem solving that is focused on reaching a goal, rather than solving a particular problem, allowing for many alternate possible solutions to be explored and tested simultaneously. In the preface to his seminal 1970 book Design Methods, John Chris Jones offers a prescient vision of the future of design as "the process of devising not individual products but whole systems or environments such as airports, transportation, hypermarkets, educational curricula, broadcasting schedules, welfare schemes, banking systems, computer networks; as participation, the involvement of the public in the decision-making process; as creativity, which is supposed to be potentially present in everyone; as an educational discipline that unites arts and science and perhaps can go further than either; and now the idea of designing Without a Product, as a process or way of living in itself." He defines design as creativity itself, which both transcends and is present in all people and disciplines. By this definition, everyone is a designer.

Early stages of design thinking

Why, then, do we need to lay claim to this type of thinking if it is in fact present in everyone? As with desktop publishing, the idea that anyone can think and solve problems like us sounds vaguely threatening. But to claim ownership of this type of thinking is missing the point, and to redefine design as the process of design thinking is a mistake. Businesses and universities who tout their "design thinking" programs often start to look strikingly similar, with whiteboards full of neon post-it notes and carefully researched personas, and this is what we as designers should be wary of. We should celebrate the marriage of design, business, education, and human behavior as a victory, leverage this new legitimacy we've earned, and look for the next challenge. Our objective shouldn't be to neatly package a niche skill set and then place it gingerly on a high shelf, away from others save for a select few CDOs; as designers we need to use and share our skills in every waking moment and in every possible situation, always questioning, never again becoming complacent.

Our job is not just to solve the problems of the present, but to see the opportunities of the future, and to involve as many people and disciplines as possible in achieving them. Otherwise we will find ourselves left behind in a profession redefined by post-it notes.

Fear and Loathing at the Unemployment Office

I recently attended a mandatory employment session at my local job assistance center. I arrived at the session in a foul mood, partly because I was unable to find parking, but mostly because the notice I received informing me that I was required to attend the session was nothing short of menacing:

“You have been selected to participate in a mandatory program called the Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessment Program (RESEA). Failure to participate or show good cause reasons for not attending by 09/16/2016 will result in a denial of benefits.”

There was no indication of what the session was for or why it was important that I attend, only the threat of what would happen if I didn’t.

I arrived that the center a few minutes late. There were ten people sitting at desks, watching a slide show. I sat down and scanned the first page of the packet I received. It was a calendar of job training and professional development classes, with titles like “LinkedIn Workshop” and “Interview More Effectively.” At the bottom of the calendar was a blue banner with a notice that a red asterisk next to a calendar event indicated it was a “great workshop for Mass Talent Connect.” This was a helpful tool. Any of these courses could be incredibly beneficial to a person looking for a job, especially an older person with a dated skill set. Every day of the calendar was full of free workshops with upbeat titles designed to give people confidence and improve their chances of finding work. It was a dramatic and refreshing change in tone from the registration email.

The instructor went through the agenda, reading bullet points from the slides. I looked around the room. We were evenly divided between men and women, and I guessed the age range was from early twenties to late fifties. One black woman sat in front of me, the rest of the room was white; a fairly representative sample of the population of Berkshire County, statistically speaking. I noticed a sign taped to the wall: NO CELL PHONES. I was keenly aware by this time of my hypersensitivity to the tone of government documents, but even this sign seemed unnecessarily accusatory. Couldn’t we be trusted to make or take a phone call if we needed to? We were there because we didn’t have jobs, through no fault of our own. The DUA’s own website said so:

“DUA administers the Unemployment Insurance (UI) program which provides temporary income assistance to Massachusetts workers who are unemployed through no fault of their own and who are able to work, available for work and looking for a job.”

Why, then, did I feel so guilty? I didn’t think I’d made any mistakes on my weekly applications for benefits, but I began to worry that I’d forgotten to check a box or provide a timely response to a request, which would result in immediate termination of my benefits. Immediate termination. Maybe I had done something to deserve this. Maybe it was it my fault after all.

As we got to the slide with a list of phone numbers to contact, the woman next to me remarked that it had taken her a month to speak to a person.

“A month?” The instructor replied. “We’re getting better, then!”

The fallout was swift and unsparing. One man had waited eight weeks for his benefits to start. Another woman waiting for her benefits had been sent to the Springfield office an hour away to submit her application for food stamps for her three children, only to learn she qualified for a mere $15 a month. Almost everyone had been disconnected from the call center at some point. Each story was the same: I called but was disconnected; I went to the site but it didn’t work. The tone became sharper, more aggravated. The instructor was sympathetic, and gave us a brief backstory: The Department of Unemployment Assistance and the Career Centers, while both part of the Office of Labor and Workforce Development, don’t interface with one another. Budget cuts and mass layoffs at the DUA resulted in those people moving over to the CC, so ironically the DUA was underequipped to deal with the number of unemployment applications. When vacant positions were subsequently filled at the DUA, the new employees had little experience working directly with people, and the quality of service suffered. This seemed to be somewhat cyclical, with modest improvements inevitably followed by another round of layoffs or budget cuts in one department or the other. The problem was compounded by the botched rollout of the online claim service in 2013, after which the Secretary of Labor fired the senior officials involved in the launch. Somehow, the instructor’s sincere though no less frustrating explanation softened the tone of the room. He was honest with us, and that was all we needed. A sense of decorum returned to the conversation. He mentioned the cell phone signs.

“Usually the person sitting right under the sign pulls out their phone and starts texting,” he said. “The reason for these signs is that we’re concerned about the cameras in the phones. If someone took a selfie and checked in here, and another person was in the photo, that’s a violation of their privacy. It might cause a really uncomfortable situation for them, and ultimately we’re liable,” he explained. Again, knowing the reason behind the signs was enough for anyone tempted to stick it to the man to put away their phone. We could all understand someone not wanting her employment status being broadcast across social media without her consent. We looked at each other and nodded in agreement, as if to make a silent pact: Let’s be angry with the State, not each other.

The unemployment rate in Massachusetts is 4.1%, one of the lowest in the country. But, as the woman next to me pointed out, “that’s just a number.” It doesn’t mean much to someone who needs to pay for child care for three children so that she can drive an hour each way to apply for food stamps. However, that number takes on meaning when it represents individuals instead of a part of a whole. 4.1% of the total population of Massachusetts is just short of 280,000. I imagined 280,000 unemployed people in an unmarked room with NO CELL PHONE signs taped to the wall, after having just received a sharply-worded mandatory participation notice and being repeatedly hung up on by the department that exists to help them. 280,000 people who hadn’t done anything wrong but were treated with suspicion and contempt in every single interaction with their government. Even the photocopied signs taped to the wall sent a clear message: “We don’t trust you.” Putting this many people in this position not only creates conditions that heighten the collective level of anger and frustration, but it gives the man at the front of the room a great deal of power. The instructor of my class listened to us express our anger and chose to tell us what he understood to be the truth: that the department was stretched so thin it simply couldn’t handle the number of applications and help requests. We empathized with the people at the DUA call center, watching helplessly as their phones lit up, knowing that 280,000 people were on the other end, depending on them to process their claims, and knowing they were going to fail. We were then able to collectively direct our frustration in a more constructive way. How can we change this? Is there someone we can contact to express our concerns? Is the DUA hiring? (This was followed by chuckles). I couldn’t help but imagine what the reaction would have been if he’d chosen instead to name a scapegoat.

It’s impossible not to look at this as a microcosm of society as a whole. When a large swath of the population feels they’ve been stripped of the power to make decisions in their own lives, they become understandably frustrated. But when they’re given a set of tools that don’t work by people who don’t appear to care, this frustration quickly turns to anger. As John Lydon said, “Anger is an energy.” Energy needs an outlet, and those in positions of power to affect change have the ability to provide that outlet. It can be constructive or destructive, and that direction can be determined by something as subtle as the tone of an email.

The DUA, though underfunded and poorly staffed, could take some steps to improve their services. One would be to simply identify and communicate the role of the Department of Labor and Workforce Development. Its job is to serve the people of Massachusetts, but nowhere on the website does it mention its mission. Another step would be to rewrite boilerplate emails, introducing language that reminds and assures people that the department is there to help, and give them a clear path to reach a person if they need to. The current accusatory tone of state government correspondence is impossible to escape, and it permeates every form of communication, from writtern to printed to verbal. The third would be to audit the content of the online claim center, identify the goal of the site, and simply remove content that doesn’t support this goal.

These are dark times for public perception of government, especially at the federal level. Conspiracy theories abound; policy proposals are regarded with suspicion, cynicism, and outright hostility. There is an opportunity here, however, for state and local governments to focus on the micro instead of the macro, and see what small tweaks could be made to improve public services. Involve groups of people to be part of the solution, even if the solution is as small as redesigning a “no cell phone” flyer. When people are treated with respect, they make better choices. Good choices lead to bigger, better opportunities. The converse is also true. So in order to make positive changes on a large scale, we need to start small. Very small.

And anytime you see a “no cell phone” flyer, chances are it’s there as a reminder to respect the privacy of the people around you.

Much Ado About Hygge

My husband and I love Scandinavian television. Some couples bond over fantasy football, or long walks on the beach, or counseling sessions; we have Borgen and Klown. Even during times when we’re barely speaking except to bark answers at one another’s terse lines of questioning, all is forgiven when we finally sit down and Netflix something Søren Malling is in.

After the first season finale of Annika Bengtzon, Crime Reporter, we adopted a Swedish holiday called Walpurgis that falls on April 30, when people welcome spring by burning brush and yard waste while drinking reasonably priced wine. It’s the perfect holiday for us: it involves alcohol consumption, a minimal budget, and very little planning, and is predicated on a chore we’d probably otherwise put off indefinitely. Despite its utilitarian nature, we look forward to its arrival each year. The emotional effect of celebrating this holiday is powerful, but difficult to describe. It’s not joy, precisely, nor excitement; it’s warmly nostalgic yet not precious; there’s a quiet coziness about it that sets it apart from more festive holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas. It’s a snug feeling. Recently, I discovered that the word that describes this feeling is hygge. Hygge is a Danish word, not Swedish, but the idea seems to permeate Scandinavian life in the same way that Americans think of comfort food. The execution may differ somewhat from region to region, but the concept is universal.

Hygge has had a lot of press in recent months. Like the KonMari method of throwing all your things away, the concept of hygge has suddenly inspired countless lifestyle blogs, Pinterest boards, and hand-crocheted mug cozies, and its allure is heightened further because there is evidently no word for it in English. But unlike saudade, an untranslatable Portugese word for something like nostalgia that caught on briefly but was too esoteric to be universally relatable, everyone seems to know the feeling of hygge. It’s curling up in front of the fire with a cup of cocoa; putting on warm socks after shoveling snow; reading a book on a rainy day. It’s a feeling of warmth and safety and contentment. And unlike saudade, which tends to draw its power from music, hygge can be described as more of a literary notion. Imagine sitting in front of the great fireplace in the Gryffindor common room, surrounded by friends and laughter, or the first time Mary whispered to herself among the matted vines of her secret garden. This overwhelming yet quotidian feeling can be brought about almost immediately just by imagining being curled up in a quiet corner with a good book.

For me, this warm, intoxicating feeling turned into a crippling addiction, and it began with Beatrix Potter.

“Dedicated to all Pickles, especially to those who get upon my garden wall."

As a child I practically ached to live in the little stone cottage where Tom Kitten got into so much mischief. I would sit for hours in my room, poring over the delicate watercolor illustrations, copying them, drawing them at different angles, then from far away, my tiny cottage a grey dot among the emerald green hills and slate sky of the English countryside. Sometimes it would be covered in ivy, others surrounded by mature rosebushes. I’d imagine I was sitting in an upstairs nook in a cozy tufted chair, watching the rain fall straight down and bounce off the foxglove blossoms below my window. In fact, my daydream of cozying up in this little English snuggery looked just like what I was already doing, if it were illustrated by Beatrix Potter: sitting in a quiet corner of my room next to a window above my mother’s garden, immersed in a book. This, though I didn’t acknowledge it at the time, was hygge.

As I grew up, I sought out hygge wherever I could, which became more difficult and awkward as a teenager. There were parties and football games to go to, and I did, grudgingly, usually coming up with an excuse for why I had to go home within an hour or so of arriving. I’d immediately change from my grunge uniform of a baby doll dress and Doc Martens to my flannel pajamas, and open the latest Stephen King paperback or start a game of Scrabble with my mom. In the summers I yearned for rainy days, when I could sit and read, uninterrupted, for hours on end, and didn’t feel so guilty about not going outside to play basketball with kids from the neighborhood. Eventually, however, I realized that the phone calls had all but stopped, and the party invitations only came from family members celebrating birthdays. My constant yearning for hygge had effectively ended my social life, as I considered my best friend to be Glenn Gould (1932–1982), whom I could hear mumbling to himself on his recording of the Goldberg Variations and who I felt was the only person who really understood me.

As an adult, I decided to try to break my hygge addiction by immersing myself in city life, and moved to Washington D.C. I immediately got a job as a bartender so that I could hone my social skills and learn how to meet people. But before long, I’d found a 300-sf “junior” one-bedroom apartment—a studio apartment with a closet big enough to stuff in a twin mattress—filled it with books, and created my very own living nook. I’d walk to Second Story Books with an armload of volumes I’d already read, trade them in for another armload on my to-read list, and sit in a chair in the corner for hours, surrounded by dusty piles of “out-of-print, used and rare books in all subjects.” Once again, I came to the painful realization that I had forsaken human interaction in favor of the familiar cozy warmth of hygge. It was time to put a stop to this.

“Think of the maintenance of the outbuildings! Could I learn to prune the fruit trees myself, or would I need to hire a service?” My adult self now asks. “The cable is buried, right? A dish would look so tacky against the stonework.”

I began making lists of things I knew I should be doing, like going to class and making eye contact with people, and held myself to them. Only after checking off everything on my list each day did I reward myself with an evening curled up in a blanket with a book. I soon began to realize that coming out of the shadows and giving myself responsibilities wasn’t terrifying at all; in fact, it was exhilarating. I found a job at an architecture firm where I thrived; I graduated from college with a well-reviewed thesis and some newfound confidence; I joined an online dating network (back in 2003, when online dating was still definitely sketchy and potentially dangerous) and met my future husband. I felt like a new person, and the time I had spent alone reading felt like a distant memory. My lists became longer, then became outlines for other, more detailed lists, which I relied on for everything from weekly meal planning to lifetime professional and financial goals. Months passed, then years, and I hadn’t read a single book. Then, in what would be a novice and heavy-handed stroke of literary foreshadowing, we left D.C. and moved to the wooded hills of Western Massachusetts, bought a small farmhouse cottage with pastoral views, and had a son. My books became shims and coasters, and sometimes stacked and used as side tables. Some I kept; most were dropped in the local Goodwill depository. I tried my hand at gardening and succeeded for a few seasons, but as the years wore on and I became more focused on balancing work and motherhood, the vegetable garden became overrun with weeds and the shrubs were wild and unruly. Even a tiny cottage can be overwhelming to maintain; we replaced the roof and boiler, remodeled the kitchen and bathrooms, tried to keep up with the mowing and pruning, and still felt like the house and yard were winning. There was always so much to do. Then, when our son turned one, I discovered Owl.

Owl at Home was a birthday gift our son received from some family friends. On the night of his party, I snuggled up with him, cozy and warm in his flannel pjs, and opened the book. As I flipped to the title page I was immediately flooded with a feeling of warmth I hadn’t felt in years. Owl’s tiny forest home, buried in snow and radiating a warm, inviting glow, reminded me immediately of the cottage I’d dreamed of as a child, where Tom Kitten lived with his mother and sisters.

I believe there is hot cocoa on the stove.

Owl lived alone, and his living room was filled with books and a stone fireplace. Sometimes he’d get so tired at night after drinking his tea that he’d just fall asleep in front of the fire in his tufted wingback chair. Once, he’d opened the door to let Winter in, and the wind and snow blew in the front door and froze his soup. After he’d demanded that Winter leave (though not unkindly, because that’s the kind of owl Owl is) and slammed the door, the fire warmed his soup again, he curled up in his chair with a warm blanket, and all was right with the world. Hygge. I read this book nightly, and we quickly sought out all things Arnold Lobel. Next was the Frog and Toad series, still our favorite. In one story, Frog tells a scary story of how he’d encountered the Old Dark Frog deep in the woods one night, and how he’d escaped. A breathless Toad asks, “Frog, is this true?” “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” says Frog ominously. Our son clutches his fleece blanket, Boo, and asks me to keep the lamp on.

Now, we make hygge part of every day. Not in a precious, mandated way, but because it seems to run in the family to crave this sense of simple security and togetherness. My husband built our son a loft bed for his tiny bedroom, reminiscent of my Washingtonian junior bedroom, that has a cozy reading nook below piled high with pillows. We spend an hour each night here, reading in the soft glow of the lamp, wrapped in Boo and surrounded by stuffed animals. Then, after kissing Rowan goodnight, we curl up on the couch and start a new season of Broen/Bron.

“Momma, will Boo ever lose its snug?” Our son asks one night. I think of how quickly this feeling came back to me after so many years of being absent, just by opening a children’s book. “Not if you don’t want it to,” I tell him.

UX for the Unemployed, by the Unemployed

I recently found myself without a full-time job. The immediate effect of unemployment was like suddenly breaking free of a bad relationship: I still had the best years of my life ahead of me, and I was emboldened by having in fact been made stronger by an experience that didn’t kill me. Get ready, world, I warned. Here I come.

Then I filed for unemployment. What I assumed would be a series of straightforward questions about my current job status turned out to be an experience that can only be described as harrowing.

It was a Friday, and I had received a printout from the HR office that included information on how to file, so I scanned it quickly for a phone number or website. There was no mention on the printout of filing online, but the back panel was titled “Obtaining UI services by telephone.” “It’s Easy,” the headline announced. But there was no phone number listed anywhere in the six paragraphs of dense text, which described in detail the four steps one would need to take after dialing the number. Another section of the printout was titled “You have a choice. There are two ways to file your claim for Unemployment Insurance benefits.” One option was to file in person, the other was to call the TeleClaim Center. Again, no number. I finally found the number buried in another dense section of text on the back of the printout unrelated to the first two sections. I called, and a pre-recorded message informed me that the office was closed.

“It’s easy!” they said. Note: only the fact that the pamphlet contains important information has been translated to nine languages; past this, we’re each on our own to channel the spirit of the pioneers and blindly forge ahead. 

“You have a choice!” they said. Note: The telephone number can be found on the middle panel, but even then is couched in the most opaque language possible. I imagine a note scrawled in the margin on the 17th round of layout edits: “Tel# needs to pop. Put a box around it.”

Hoping to get this out of the way before the weekend, and running out of phone battery, I decided to visit the site. Not knowing exactly where to start, I googled “Massachusetts unemployment.” The top hit was part of the mass.gov site, so I figured that must be it. The link took me to a page titled “UI Online for Claimants,” but there was no indication of how to apply for benefits or set up an account. My first reaction when I visit an unfamiliar site and experience confusion is usually to assume user error. I admit to having occasional noobish feelings of online insecurity that can keep me from noticing obvious calls to action, and there was probably a big button right in front of me that said something like “Click here to begin” that my nervousness was preventing me from seeing. I parsed the page title. UI must stand for Unemployment Insurance. Check. I’m a person attempting to file a claim, so that must make me a claimant. Check. I’m in the right place. Newly confident, I looked again for the button that had eluded me. But there was no such button.

The landing page gives every indication that applying for unemployment is possible, but no indication of how.

I scrutinized the site. What could I be missing? The top navigation applied to all of mass.gov; there was no option to explore the unemployment section separately. Below the page title and description were a few links that appeared to be informational and unrelated to filing a claim. I went back out to my google search results and scrolled down. All the links went to pages within the area of the site I’d just left, and there was not a single mention of a phone number or email address. I went back to the original page. At the top was a link titled “Skip to main content.” Clicking the link simply skipped the search function and took me five lines down to the page title. I started to panic and began scrolling. Below the first list of links was a series of videos, one of which was titled, “How to Apply for Unemployment Benefits.” Could this be real? I hadn’t come this far to not find out. The answer, after agreeing to leave the site and open the video in the YouTube app, was not only yes, it was real, but that it was over eight minutes long, featured music, special effects, an actress, and a narrator, and only mentioned a url at the 7:55 mark, which turned out to be the same url I’d just come from. I started to imagine I had uncovered a massive state government conspiracy: tax dollars on yet-to-be-received unemployment income had somehow paid to produce an eight-minute video that described in excruciating detail how to navigate a site that seemed to not exist.

By this time it was nearing 8pm, and with no other option, I heeded the wise advice of Dory: “Just keep swimming.” Weary, I scrolled further down, wondering if I’d ever hit rock bottom, and just below the online hours (online hours??? Isn’t the Internet on all the time?), and before the standard IE10 disclaimer, I saw two buttons:

Please let me do both of these things.

For a moment I didn’t move. I was afraid that this was some popup designed to trick me into believing I could actually create an account, and that clicking it might lead me to an online gambling site. But after a few seconds it was still there, and I tapped “Apply for benefits.” From here, it was smooth sailing. I just needed my social security number and I could finally set up my account and submit my claim. I waited for my confirmation email, clicked through, re-entered my social, and was brought to the password prompt, which struck me as vaguely threatening. I hadn’t even had a chance to attempt to commit insurance fraud, and it was practically yelling at me, in oversized red type, that I only had four chances to remember the password I worked so hard to get before my account would be locked. 

“We’re sorry you just lost your job, but if you blow this, don’t come crying to us. The Division of Unemployment Assistance has better things to do than to assist you. Instructional videos don’t produce themselves.”

But I didn’t forget. I carefully tapped in my eight-digit password, correctly identifying upper- and lowercase characters, selected “Login,” and waited to take the first step in getting on with my new life, with time to spare before midnight. Instead, I was informed that the site was unavailable, presumably because everyone had gone home for the day and turned off the lights. Except that this is not how the Internet is supposed to work. 

The Department of Unemployment Assistance is currently and permanently unavailable to anyone with young children.

At this point, there was nothing more to do. I went to bed and after a fitful, restless sleep I awoke the next morning to find an ominous message in my inbox, alerting me to a “time sensitive correspondence” awaiting me in my UI Inbox, to which failure to respond could result in denial of my unemployment benefits. Again, I was overwhelmed with feelings of guilt that I had somehow sabotaged my amazing new life, before I even had the chance to apply for said benefits. It could all be over before it even began. I clicked on the link without wasting any time to make coffee or even go to the bathroom; I couldn’t risk it. I tapped the link; nothing happened. User error. I tapped again. Still nothing. Finally I copied the link, pasted it into my browser, and the result literally took my breath away.

Someone’s job was to set up an automated email that did one thing. One fucking thing.

As Albus Dumbledore once said, “It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” People who depend on public programs to feed their families, find work, and afford housing, choose to do so despite a system so poorly considered that it practically guarantees failure. They choose to follow the rules despite official language that clearly communicates suspicion of guilt. They choose to seek out answers when their questions and concerns are repeatedly ignored. Can we blame people for being angry and for looking for other ways to survive, even it if it means not playing by the rules? Not I, not after this. I spent a mere 24 hours fighting through a single page of a sprawling government website that itself only represents a tiny fraction of the whole system. Imagine being confronted with this level of inefficiency and confusion in order to go to the grocery store, look for a job, fight a parking ticket, visit the doctor, send your child to school, or apply for public housing assistance. On top of that, public programs are often so tainted with negative press that the rest of the world seems to think you’re probably guilty of something anyway.

Navigating the unemployment process has taught me something no amount of higher education ever could: choices matter. And the fewer our options, the more difficult it is to make good choices. So go back up to that instructional video link, and instead of watching it, spend those eight minutes, eighteen seconds in the service of another. Tell someone they’re doing a good job. Ask someone if they need help. Call your mother. You’ll never get that time back, so make it count for something.

A Seat at the Table

During my time at the architecture firm, I sat in many meetings. Many, many meetings. I usually was tasked with running the PowerPoint I'd designed for the occasion, and rarely had reason to speak or even make eye contact with anyone at the table; I just needed to pay attention to my cues. 

On one occasion, this was put to the test.

My creative director had asked me to design a deck for a proposal he planned to present to a large real estate developer in the city. The plan was to turn a struggling neighborhood into retail and mixed-use space, and it was a big deal for the firm. I put the deck together and sat in the meeting, which looked and sounded like a scene from House of Cards. As I clicked through the deck, I'd be asked to stop the presentation here and there to make time for discussion. I was addressed as "honey" and "sweetheart," and one man asked smugly if this was my first day at my job.

Throughout the meeting, I was disgusted by the vaguely sinister racist and misogynist language that was casually sprinkled into the conversation. My CD was silent when he wasn't presenting, and looked annoyed but resigned, as it would have been a huge coup to land this contract. At 23, I assumed that people in positions of power and influence possessed some sort of wisdom that verged on mystical, and were uniquely qualified to draw on their vast knowledge and use it for the greater good. I realized after this meeting that this was simply not the case. There is no moral test one must take before taking on heavy responsibility; often an important last name is all someone needs to be in a position to make far-reaching decisions that would affect generations of people and communities.

My brief foray into the world of DC real estate development hardened me and made me somewhat cynical, but I learned from it one thing: I liked having a seat at that table.

Getting started

My first job was at a large international architecture firm based in downtown Washington DC. I had been a bartender working my way through design school, and one day was in the right place at the right time and landed an interview with the marketing department. I got the job—a summer internship at first—and jumped in with both feet.

The work environment was intense, but I thrived. I quickly became part of a team that was working to submit a design for a major new museum in the city, which meant we were working around the clock, filling whiteboards with notes and sketches, designing and redesigning, and ordering endless cartons of Chinese takeout. I was in charge of laying out the final presentation as large posters with scale renderings of the building design, floor plans, and elevations. I absorbed the terminology like a sponge, and though I wasn't an architect myself I became an integral part of the team. We spent so much time together we became family—a family of tenacious young designers and architects with nothing to lose and ready to take on the world.

When the competition was over (we lost to a firm in Houston), I was exhausted but ready for the next challenge. I realized that, though I'd always been a quiet, reserved person who preferred to do things on my own terms, this new way of collaborating was exhilarating and brought out the best in me. I was trusted to do work that would reach a large audience and have an impact on communities, such as the Museums and Memorials Master Plan for the National Capital Planning Commission. Just a few months earlier I was a bartender with no degree, and now I was sitting in meetings with people who were deciding the future of the city. 

It was then that I knew I was a strategist at heart, and this realization changed me for life.