This past week I was fortunate enough to attend the PIE Demo Day at the Bagdad Theater. I was excited to see what the first class of PIE had been up to and what was happening in the start up community here in Portland. It was a fun event and a new experience for me, I’d never heard anyone pitching their business looking for funding, so I learned quite a bit by watching. But it also made me think quite a bit. At some point during the introduction, one of the founders of PIE talked about businesses changing the world. And as I pondered the businesses that presented I couldn’t help but wonder how any of the ideas were truly world changing. I mean absolutely no disrespect to any of the folks who worked hard and were on that stage, they all are interesting and the business ideas were quite good. A few of the apps I would love to try. But would I classify them as world changing?

This theme keeps coming up in things that I am reading. First in The Great Discontent interview with Noah Stokes, he talked about the experience of going to Brooklyn Beta and being challenged by business leaders to think about how we as a community can use our skills to change things in healthcare and education. I read a lot of different thoughts online after Brooklyn Beta that reverberated the theme of doing something larger.

Then I got the second issue of The Manual and read the piece by Cennydd Bowles. It struck the same chord, Cennydd calls for great design, human centered design.

Great products also meet the needs of society as a whole. So we should design for the good of the web, for the good of design, for the good of the world.

-page 56, The Manual, issue 2

And again he reiterates:

In this new environment, we’ll see personal success defined through the success we bring to other people’s lives.

-page 56, The Manual, issue 2

In the final essay in The Manual, Josh Brewer sums up a lot of what is being said about design leading today.

The era of great design teams is upon us. It will be led by men and women who challenge what we think is possible, inspire us to do more than we believe we can, and encourage us to be even greater than they are.

These leaders free us as teams to reach inside ourselves and create what has never been seen or done before.

-pages 83-84, The Manual, issue 2

I in no way feel like I understand fully how I can and should be participating in something that not only is exciting and fun for me to do as work, but also would be contributing to something much larger than myself, but I do know that I’m now on the lookout for what it may be. I not only want to help create beautiful things that function well, but things that will meet a real need. Because I am tired of the chatter about the next great app that connects me to my friends, I have more than enough ways to connect with people online and in reality, I should probably step away from the screen and connect in person more often. So this week I’ve been contemplative and I’ve been wondering a lot about what this means for me. The desire is growing in me, now it is time for me to figure out what to do. Also, as I prepare to make a large change in my professional life, where does this fit in? That’s what I’ll be thinking about over the next several weeks and probably months.

Update: Just after I posted this, I watched a fantastic video and reread a recent article. They tie in perfectly with the ideas above. Wilson Miner’s talk from Build 2011 is amazing and for a small donation you can see all the videos from the conference, it is worth it for this talk alone. In addition, Cameron Koczon’s A List Apart article is fantastic. We are in a time where lots of people are thinking about design and design as leading the way. It’s exciting and provides a lot to think about.

This past week I began the concrete moves toward a fairly risky and big change in my life. I’ll talk more about it later here, but if you follow me on the Twitters, than you probably know what I’m talking about. But after I finally did the first concrete thing toward my goal, amazing things began to happen to me. And I relearned 3 very important things.

1. You never know when you meet someone how they may be an important connection or relationship later on down the road. As I have talked with people this week it has been amazing some of the really amazing leads and connections that are happening. Plus the ability to even make change happen for me is because of a connection that I hadn’t talked to in years who contacted me out of the blue.
2. This is a small town, especially within the sub community that I work. BUT that being said, folks are the most generous people, always willing to chat and answer questions and for that I am so very grateful.
3. Connections, relationships and people are what it is all truly about. The rest falls into place from there.

This was hammered home to me throughout this week. And then today I read this:

I’ve said it before & I’ll say it again: Act like the person you want to be, not the person you think you are. Action –> Reaction –> Proof

— Whitney Hess (@whitneyhess) January 12, 2012

Whitney said it so well, and she is right. So as I realize that people around me are awesome, I’m doing my best to return that awesomeness as much as possible.

Many months ago I wrote about my frustration in trying to learn JavaScript. It has been my difficulty and my secret for far too long. So for the holidays I took vacation time and the week between Christmas and New Years I studied JavaScript. I am loaded up with books and I am also using a few online resources. I have an idea for a project where I’m going to code a gauge that will pull information from a data warehouse that my husband built that to learn how to do that sort of thing (yes we are a geeky household). So with all that, I dug in to start learning. It is going very slowly, I mean really slowly. My poor mind just doesn’t work great with this stuff, but I am persevering and I have to say that I am learning. By the end of the week I was getting the problems and I was understanding what I was doing.

So in the next couple weeks I will be soldiering on and trying to get my project built out over the weekends. But I have to say, this is the farthest I’ve come and I have also figured out how I learn this stuff well, I need problems to solve and exercises to do and I’ve found tons. Thank you internets, you are the best for all you offer for free!

In case anyone is wondering, here’s my list of resources that I’m using:

• Eloquent JavaScript – It is so awesome to have this all in one in the browser and I’m half way through.
• Codeacademy – I love the way they do the exercises, basic, but it’s been good to get me going.
• Professional JavaScript for Web Developers – I still like having a reference type book and I’m reading it too as I look things up as I work through the above.
• JavaScript Enlightenment – This is going to be a main focus as I work through objects next

The other thing I ran across today was this from Jeremy Keith and it just reinforced my decision to learn Vanilla JavaScript rather than jQuery – there may be many times where that is much more appropriate or easier.

I also want to thank the folks who have encouraged me, you know who you are, and it has kept me going. (Especially some help from down under!)