Long story short, 1.5 years ago I quit my comfortable design career for many reasons, one was to sort some things out before I can continue, the other was to take a totally different route of how I want to spend the rest of my life - Sharing.
No I don’t have a lot of money to give away nor am I going to be sharing money. I learned that the amount of wealth that one has is not gauged by how much he owns, but how much he has shared. This can be skills, experiences, thoughts etc. Who doesn’t want to be a wealthy guy?
Another main reason is I am sick of being “just” an industrial designer. A job title gives you certain recognition, which can turn into restriction in many areas as well. I see many missed opportunities at where I worked, but because I am “just an IDer”, I can’t do much outside of the department office. So now I am on my own. My goal is to build a project from scratch based on things that I am passionate about and see needs for. It’s not restricted to design because it’s never been just about design. I will have to exercise all the skills I’ve learned from research to prototyping( and beyond), building connections in industries that I am completely new to and learn to pull a wide variety of resources to make it work. This is a tough journey and I am only at the beginning of it. One big part of this is that I want to be able to share the process, the entire journey, like a bio when it has gained a fair level of maturity. Being in the industry, there’s all these secrets and confidentiality to be observed. I understand the commercial reasons, but if there’s one thing I can share, it will be my experience if I ever come out of this journey alive.
I’ll be sharing my thoughts, reasons, challenges, opportunities, experiments, bottlenecks so on and so forth. It’s not going to be design focused, meaning the point isn’t about how I molded a part, but how I cleared my own path.
Then I thought, why wait till it’s done? Why not start right now?
So I’ve started a private blog documenting all the activities related to my project, more as a form of diary for me and some friends. My question is, what’s are your thoughts on sharing an ongoing process? For me I can see potential conflicts arising from the idea-sharing issue. I am not too concerned with my thoughts being used by someone else, after all that’s the point of sharing. However someone else may claim I’ve use his idea without permission. Or am I too worried since it’s pretty clear that whatever you put on the internet can’t be protected realistically? On the other hand, I can get advices or warnings on my approaches which can help me adjust along the way, while everyone else can learn too, like a reality freak show!
So what say you?