Dear Massimo

Dear Massimo,

I met you when I was 23 and working as a Curatorial Assistant at the Museum of Arts & Design. You and Lella came to work on the exhibition design for a show on the jewelry of Seaman Schepps. At the time, I had never worked with a real designer and I was in complete awe of your process. You were a great listener, and methodically took notes and drew sketches while we described to you our dreams for the exhibition. You had a mechanical pencil. You drew thick and distinctive lines, unquestionably bold.

Your notes were written in capitals, like an architect. You were stubborn and your stubbornness pushed all of us around you out of our comfort zones. I remember sitting with you and Lella, in the back of a yellow cab when we discussed the materials that we would be using to create the pedestals to display jewelry. You said "lead".  Lella said "MAAAAASSSSIMO, don't be ridiculous." You then described to us your vision of having the intricate jewelry stand out against the simplicity of the raw material. Your vision, was measured, austere and had perfect symmetry. As someone who had to work with the contractors to acquire the lead and to actually handle the lead to build the cases, I was of course completely terrified. Isn't lead toxic? Like, could this perfect design decision of Massimo's actually kill me in the long run?  We worked together and learned that wax detoxifies lead. We went to your studio (the first real designer's studio I had ever seen) and tested it out.  You had an I told you so look on your face like a devilish child. And so, we made the cases:

You loved a good fight. One of my favorite things was listening to you, Lella, Yoshi Waterhouse and Beatriz Cifuentes completely disagree about design direction. Lella was your partner and you had a beautiful banter that inspired me to be adventurous, and own my questioning nature. 

At the time I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my life. I was working in museums but found myself sketching in the galleries and taking side jobs just to draw. You saw me at lunch one day and asked me why I was wasting my talent and then you didn't stay around to hear an answer. Lella, of course, followed up with me and told me to try things out, to take in as much art and design as I could and that things will figure themselves out. You very much had the ask for forgiveness, not permission attitude, which I still to this day, admire.

I ended up working at the Rubin Museum of Art after that museum, and found myself constantly questioning and designing and thinking about my conversations with you. Eventually I built up enough courage to quit and went to design school. I learned about why I should admire you even more and read your writing on design, watched you speak in Helvetica and looked at your wealth of work over time. But really, that's just the evidence. You showed me how to be a designer because you embodied it. You had a viewpoint, and a goal of helping people to better understand the world they inhabit, through design. I am a stylistically a different kind of designer, but you taught me to own my stubbornness and to have an opinion. 

I will always admire you. We are lucky enough to see all the design interventions that you have left the world on a daily basis.  Thank you for being bold and stubborn. 

I already miss you.

Jess

Note: I learned that Massimo Vignelli passed away today. His son, Luca asked for all those for whom Vignelli was either an influence or an inspiration to write him a letter. This is mine.

MentorN00b : matchmaker matchmaker make me a match!

I have been doing a lot of little projects for one off events lately.  Like this badge claim page I made for the recent Mozilla Summit:

 

Or the one that I made for Mozilla Festival:
 
Usually we try to make one - offs more meaningful by actually doing some iteration on them or using them as a use case to inform the core product that we are actually working on.  So for example, I will probably work with our development and design team to figure out how to incorporate these kinds of claim pages into BadgeKit and will use the feedback that we got by standing and watching hundreds of people "test" out the sites as a usertesting and research exercise.

For these two events we also made something that I would put in the category of "schwag". Which, yeah - can totally be fun to make, but kind of usually feels a little meaningless. Here are the buttons that my teammates Chloe and Emily and I made for the events to help people to get interested in Open Badges:

This exercise, (I have to admit - quite surprisingly) turned out to be a meaningful design exploration that keeps on giving to us things to think about on the badges project. As Emily explains in her blogpost, the badges took on another life in practice. People hacked them and used them to give peers a glimpse of their identity - but not just identity with a capital I - really a deeper, more nuanced thing - how people self identify.

One day, I was in a coffee shop with Atul and Mike - thinking about the badges schwag and we were kind of doing our usual brainstorm of - wouldn't it be cool if ..... - and we came up with an idea for a prototype that could have pretty tight parameters. I would categorize this as a prototype that's not designed to scale. 

What we realized was - that at these events we would be seeing people with different kinds of expertise and desires and how in a perfect world we would match-make button wearer's so they could help each other out to learn skills. So for example, my button said that I was a javascript n00b and if Mike's button said that he was a javascript nin.ja we could be paired together.

What the three of us started to hack on was an app - where people could sign in, state their interests and then get paired with a like-minded friend to help mentorship. I could imagine this being something that could be taken further - so after a match is made, a mentor could help a n00b to develop a learning map/goal or trajectory and suggest or create badges for the n00b to work towards. Using the tools offered in BadgeKit, the mentors could then provide peer assessment for the n00bs. Additionally, the feedback loop could be closed by the n00b then giving the mentor through various kinds of mentor badges. This would in essence develop a mentor - n00b community and give participants the ability to always identify as somewhere on the spectrum for different skills or activities as mentors and/or n00bs. I particularly like this idea - that someone could be a mentor and a n00b at the exact same time. 

Here is a mockup that I worked on to start to express the idea:

We haven't gotten super far with the prototype, but I could see this as something that might be interesting to test out with the Hive or the mentor community activities at Mozilla.