Fall Wrap-Up

Originally, I was aiming for this to be an epic piece on all of the progress of thesis from the fall (if you could call it that), separated into discrete chunks; a “long read” if you will. As the document started to feel unmanageable, it felt better to break this out into pieces I could finish, edit cleanly, post, and get out into the world so I can keep moving.

This means I’m going to do something that’s against my nature. As someone who believes in the sanctity of a first publish, and the accountability of getting it finished the first time, it’s going to be weird for me to say this: New posts will appear, from time to time, in the history of these posts, to clarify and better tell the story of what’s happened. Though they’ll be new, the posts are going to be telling the chronology, so they’ll be backdated to when those events occurred, akin to recreating a diary.

With that understood, I’m going to do my best to be as aboveboard as I can with something like this. New posts will come with information about when they were originally written, and I’m going to try my best to find a way to make clarifications and edits obvious (without destroying the quality of the storytelling). Obviously I could just point people to the GitHub repo, but I think there’s something about the context of the experience that will also be important.

Here’s my plan of attack:

• “…And That’s When I Realized My Bag Was Gone,” a sad but ultimately positive story about how I had a bunch of shit stolen from me.
• “What I Learned From My First Prototype,” my first attempt at an idea that went away from my original, community space idea, since my goal was to create something pretty concrete. With a minimalist set of (what I assumed were) common cooking tools, I tried to challenge people to make a meal in the studio space. A couple of people used it, with uneven results.
• “Assumptions, Feedback, and Thanksgiving” is me doing a little bit more synthesis on an assumption map that we built in the fall to help potentially organize my thoughts. Ultimately, I think I need to create a physical manifestation of my thesis so far, as it feels like it’s leaking out of my brain.
• “Creating a Tiny Kitchen,” what I delivered as the final of the fall semester, was a twist on that first prototype. It gave a tiny, physical presence to the cooking tools and some suggestions, along with iteration to try to build a means of helping through Slack. It was ultimately not very successful at drawing in new people, but I made a great meal on it.

I also have A Huge Mess of Links that I want to clear out from the tabs scattered across my various devices. I think this is going to be particularly interesting, and I might make it a series of posts instead of one huge dump, or find a home for it somewhere.

I’m also thinking about the future: a fresh look at the food and home cooking landscape, including a potential survey of pain points; potentially taking another stab at cooking spaces for professionals that can help them reach out to a community; and of course getting out there to learn more. This process requires a little more help, though, so I‘m looking for a thesis advisor to help me get there.

It’s great to start feeling productive again, and I’m looking forward to telling my story better as well as continue exploring my topic area.