Polytechnicast – Details, episodes & analysis

A question from someone who knows someone who met me at 2D Con. Every person's path is their own but it's also fun to learn how olther folks got to where they are.

Related Links and Resources

• Word Turtle Island on Google Play

• Word Turtle Island on Steam

• Word Turtle Island on Itch (free demo available)

• Ask Me Anything — Blog of an Interactive Storyteller

• Sign up for my newsletter

Games and Classes Rob offers and Ways to Support What I Make

• Buy or wishlist Word Turtle Island on Steam.
• Take one of my classes about collaboration, creativity, and UX design: Skillshare
• Get the game Guitar Fretter, an action puzzle that makes a game of memorizing the note positions on a guitar. Now with Lefty Flip in the full version and a free demo version with 9 levels. NOW ON STEAM
• Join Skillshare via my referral link which gets you 1 month of Skillshare Premium for free.
• You can buy me a coffee with an option to send a note along.

• Subscribe to the Polytechnicast RSS feed in your podcast app

Earlier this summer I visited Columbus Ohio to visit my friends Anne and Jerzy Drozd. Part of the plan for our visit was to make some creative experiments together, one of them is this very recording with Jerzy.

For the first time I can think of both he and I are launching products at the same time. Both projects took years of development. Both we made solo. His project is the book The Inscrutable Doctor Baer and the Case of the Two-Faced Statue and mine is the action + cozy game Word Turtle Island.

In this episode, a special crossover of Thunder Punch Daily + Polytechnicast, Jerzy and I navigate stories of why we made these projects and how we're facing the significant task of marketing to reach the people we know will enjoy what we made. It's a lot like an episode of the Lean Into Art cast which was special to revisit for me, hope it will be for you too.

Related Links and Resources

• The Inscrutable Doctor Baer and the Case of the Two-Faced Statue - pre-order Jerzy's new book about a bear who catalogs and keeps safe powerful magic items, one day a wizard steals the most powerful artifact, now this academic homebody has to embark on a dangerous adventure and team up with allies to set things right
• Jerzy Drozd - Teaching Artist and Cartoonist
• Word Turtle Island - Details Plus Official Trailer - action + cozy game where you both battle with words as weapons and recover after by tending bookshelves.

• Word Turtle Island - Press Kit

• Word Turtle Island - Google Play

• Word Turtle Island - Steam

• Word Turtle Island - Itch.io

• Ask Me Anything — Blog of an Interactive Storyteller

• Sign up for my newsletter

Games and Classes Rob offers and Ways to Support What I Make

• Wishlist Word Turtle Island on Steam.
• Take one of my classes about collaboration, creativity, and UX design: Skillshare
• Get the game Guitar Fretter, an action puzzle that makes a game of memorizing the note positions on a guitar. Now with Lefty Flip in the full version and a free demo version with 9 levels.
• Join Skillshare via my referral link which gets you 1 month of Skillshare Premium for free.
• You can buy me a coffee with an option to send a note along.

• Subscribe to the Polytechnicast RSS feed in your podcast app

Have you been part of an organization that seems to repeat projects that don't learn much from one another? It's a thing I've wondered: why do companies forget? This episode of the Polytechnicast I journal about group memory and wonder if it would be helpful to remember what different teams have tried and learned in the past. Is it because we resist repeating other peoples stories?

Related Links and Resources

• Customizing Your Next Creative Challenge, join the class at Skillshare or download your own copy at my workshop store.

• Interactive Storyteller blog

• Sign up for my newsletter, be in the know of what I'm making and learning about.

Games and Classes Rob offers and Ways to Support the Polytechnicast

• Take one of my classes about collaboration, creativity, design:
  • Listening Like a Coach (Video Workshop and PDF Materials), add to your leadership and collaboration skills. Get it on Gumroad or Skillshare
  • Drawing User Journey Maps, make meaningful products with visual collaboration and narrative that combines many perspectives. Get it on Gumroad or Skillshare
  • Customizing Your Next Creative Challenge, find your fun and useful approach to your own creative challenge or a public one, whether you draw, code, write, create a recipe that works for you. Get it on Gumroad or Skillshare
• Get the game Guitar Fretter, an action puzzle that makes a game of memorizing the note positions on a guitar. Now with Lefty Flip in the full version and a free demo version with 9 levels.
• Join Skillshare via my referral link which gets you 1 month of Skillshare Premium for free.

• You can buy me a coffee with an option to send a note along.

• Subscribe to the Polytechnicast RSS feed in your podcast app

Any path that brings you to journaling about your art, here I share some context around planning what you'd want to get out of your journaling plus choosing and creating prompts that are a good fit for what you want.

Related Links and Resources

• Art Soundoff

• Customizing Your Next Creative Challenge, join the class at Skillshare or download your own copy at my workshop store.

• Interactive Storyteller blog

• Sign up for my newsletter, be in the know of what I'm making and learning about.

Rob's Products and Ways to Support the Polytechnicast

• Get Guitar Fretter, an action puzzle that makes a game of memorizing the note positions on a guitar.
  • Available on iOS, Android, Windows 10, and MacOS!
  • Features 4 or 5 string bass, 6 or 7 string guitar, multiple play modes, difficulty levels, and more.

• You can buy me a coffee with an option to send a note along.

• Subscribe to the Polytechnicast RSS feed in your podcast app

Something I'm grateful for is to be on a learning adventure together with folks I've worked with. At times I get questions from folks who listen to the show and folks I've been on teams with in the past. I'm going to include all this in a category of listener questions and make a few Polytechnicasts based on these questions.

In this episode I get a question from a colleague who is wondering about practicing communication skills coming from a product team and engineering perspective. How could this help with understanding and communicating your own philosophy and values in a collaboration?

Related Links and Resources

• Interactive Storyteller blog

• Sign up for my newsletter, be in the know of what I'm making and learning about.

Rob's Products and Ways to Support the Polytechnicast

• Get Guitar Fretter, an action puzzle that makes a game of memorizing the note positions on a guitar.
  • Available on iOS, Android, Windows 10, and MacOS!
  • Features 4 or 5 string bass, 6 or 7 string guitar, multiple play modes, difficulty levels, and more.
• Creative design coaching services, workshops, and ebooks for ux design, creative coding, creative challenges, goals, and storytelling in Rob's store
  • Drawing User Journey Maps to Gather Ideas and Collaborate
  • Customizing Your Next Creative Challenge
• Subscribe to the Polytechnicast RSS feed in your podcatcher

The emotional work of discovering, including, representing, and collaborating in design is what I explore in this think aloud journal. This recording didn't start as a Polytechnicast or even an exploration about UX Mindset but that's where I found myself going.

Since the beginning of 2021 I've been blogging every day on my Interactive Storyteller blog. I hope you'll join me there too as I talk about illustrating, making games, and UX design. It's very much the prose form of the Polytechnicast.

Related Links and Resources

• Interactive Storyteller blog

• Introduction to the UX Mindset Series

• Polytechnicast - UX Mindset - Creative Roadblocks Then a Book Outline #artsoundoff — Blog of an Interactive Storyteller

Rob's Products and Ways to Support the Polytechnicast

• Get Guitar Fretter, an action puzzle that makes a game of memorizing the note positions on a guitar.
  • Available on iOS, Android, Windows 10, and MacOS!
  • Features 4 or 5 string bass, 6 or 7 string guitar, multiple play modes, difficulty levels, and more.
• Creative design coaching services, workshops, and ebooks for ux design, creative coding, creative challenges, goals, and storytelling in Rob's store
  • Drawing User Journey Maps to Gather Ideas and Collaborate
  • Customizing Your Next Creative Challenge
• Subscribe to the Polytechnicast RSS feed in your podcatcher

Here I explore some of the reasonable and unreasonable goals I had for this month of journaling and developing the UX Mindset series. Practicing this kind of thing helps you meet your own creative process quirks and explore ways to change and work around those quirks. I recorded so many more rough draft journals than I posted, at least 2:1 if not 3:1. It helped me explore the big topic and discover a concept for a UX Mindset book.

We'll see where the UX Mindset series goes from here. Probably be back on the Polytechnicast, certainly will be in upcoming workshops, and a good chance I'll persue developing a book.

Related Links and Resources

• Introduction to the UX Mindset Series
• UX Mindset for Business
• UX Mindset for Software Engineering
• UX Mindset for Designers
• UX Mindset for Artists
• UX Mindset - Lists
• UX Mindset - Listening
• UX Mindset - Groups of People Interconnected
• UX Mindset - Mental Model You're Working Toward
• UX Mindset - Misunderstanding and Misuse of UX's Power
• UX Mindset - Active Learning Is Certain-enough Instead of Overconfident
• Creative challenge I'm taking part in and co-founded with Jerzy Drozd: Art Soundoff — Lean Into Art

Rob's Products and Ways to Support the Polytechnicast

• Get Guitar Fretter, an action puzzle that makes a game of memorizing the note positions on a guitar.
  • Available on iOS, Android, Windows 10, and MacOS!
  • Features 4 or 5 string bass, 6 or 7 string guitar, multiple play modes, difficulty levels, and more.
• Creative design coaching services, workshops, and ebooks for ux design, creative coding, creative challenges, goals, and storytelling in Rob's store
  • Drawing User Journey Maps to Gather Ideas and Collaborate
  • Customizing Your Next Creative Challenge
• Subscribe to the Polytechnicast RSS feed in your podcatcher

Actively learning is a lot like using applied research. It's a very useful place to work from, you can be confident enough to proceed making things yet not too confident to prevent learning as you go.

We setup teams and organizations to sink or swim based on too much certainty. We're certain often from a combination of ego and efficiency seeking without adapting until expensive mistakes happen. What if we practice being confident enough and setup teams to actively learn instead?

And the UX Mindset series continues!

Related Links and Resources

• Introduction to the UX Mindset Series
• UX Mindset for Business
• UX Mindset for Software Engineering
• UX Mindset for Designers
• UX Mindset for Artists
• UX Mindset - Lists
• UX Mindset - Listening
• UX Mindset - Groups of People Interconnected
• UX Mindset - Mental Model You're Working Toward
• UX Mindset - Misunderstanding and Misuse of UX's Power
• Creative challenge I'm taking part in and co-founded with Jerzy Drozd: Art Soundoff — Lean Into Art

Rob's Products and Ways to Support the Polytechnicast

• Get Guitar Fretter, an action puzzle that makes a game of memorizing the note positions on a guitar.
  • Available on iOS, Android, Windows 10, and MacOS!
  • Features 4 or 5 string bass, 6 or 7 string guitar, multiple play modes, difficulty levels, and more.
• Creative design coaching services, workshops, and ebooks for ux design, creative coding, creative challenges, goals, and storytelling in Rob's store
  • Drawing User Journey Maps to Gather Ideas and Collaborate
  • Customizing Your Next Creative Challenge
• Subscribe to the Polytechnicast RSS feed in your podcatcher

Where does UX go wrong? Whether a system is broken at the surface or takes deeper understanding to see how it's not serving the health of its audience along with it's other constituencies: UX can be used to help fix or to make things worse. How can that be? Organizations have a lot to do to just exist and maintain exsistence. Some are not questioning things they could question to fix what's broken. Let's pay attention, be curious, inclusive and move what we make toward collective health.

And the UX Mindset series continues!

Related Links and Resources

• Introduction to the UX Mindset Series
• UX Mindset for Business
• UX Mindset for Software Engineering
• UX Mindset for Designers
• UX Mindset for Artists
• UX Mindset - Lists
• UX Mindset - Listening
• UX Mindset - Groups of People Interconnected
• UX Mindset - Mental Model You're Working Toward
• Creative challenge I'm taking part in and co-founded with Jerzy Drozd: Art Soundoff — Lean Into Art

Rob's Products and Ways to Support the Polytechnicast

• Get Guitar Fretter, an action puzzle that makes a game of memorizing the note positions on a guitar.
  • Available on iOS, Android, Windows 10, and MacOS!
  • Features 4 or 5 string bass, 6 or 7 string guitar, multiple play modes, difficulty levels, and more.
• Creative design coaching services, workshops, and ebooks for ux design, creative coding, creative challenges, goals, and storytelling in Rob's store
  • Drawing User Journey Maps to Gather Ideas and Collaborate
  • Customizing Your Next Creative Challenge
• Subscribe to the Polytechnicast RSS feed in your podcatcher

It's useful to have even a rough concept of what you're working toward, things you know are important or likely to encounter, or at least are worth checking to see if they'd be helpful. For example, a mental model like a creative progression going from rough concept to refined to complete. You can have a UX Mindset informed mental model of getting your work done so that you are working toward including your audience.

And the UX Mindset series continues!

Related Links and Resources

• Introduction to the UX Mindset Series
• UX Mindset for Business
• UX Mindset for Software Engineering
• UX Mindset for Designers
• UX Mindset for Artists
• UX Mindset - Lists
• UX Mindset - Listening
• UX Mindset - Groups of People Interconnected
• A Whack on the Side of the Head by Roger von Oech | Grand Central Publishing
• Creative challenge I'm taking part in and co-founded with Jerzy Drozd: Art Soundoff — Lean Into Art

Rob's Products and Ways to Support the Polytechnicast

• Get Guitar Fretter, an action puzzle that makes a game of memorizing the note positions on a guitar.
  • Available on iOS, Android, Windows 10, and MacOS!
  • Features 4 or 5 string bass, 6 or 7 string guitar, multiple play modes, difficulty levels, and more.
• Creative design coaching services, workshops, and ebooks for ux design, creative coding, creative challenges, goals, and storytelling in Rob's store
  • Drawing User Journey Maps to Gather Ideas and Collaborate
  • Customizing Your Next Creative Challenge
• Subscribe to the Polytechnicast RSS feed in your podcatcher