It felt like a monumental task—to excavate old work, attempt to re-evaluate its relevance, disregard other work, and somehow re-contextualize these images in a naval gazing effort to prove to myself something was possibly accomplished over the past 15 years of my life staring at a screen. What is the end goal of a portfolio or an archive, especially in the design context, when most of the work feels connected to a specific time/space/location or client?
This question has plagued me for years and has been the excuse to avoid spending an inordinate amount of time and effort in documenting it all. For whom is this effort benefiting and why document and re-contextualize it all into perpetuity? What does one want or expect from this all?—praise from the people who already know you and your practice?—opening oneself to indifference or critique from online designer randos?—a one-note advertisement to attract potential collaborators or worse, convincing them to give you their money? In our shared modern online experience of endless scrolling and gated web experiences, a design portfolio, online or offline, does seem like an inaudible fart in a vast universe of universes.
Certainly, I am not alone, novel in my exploration of this concept, or will I share a set of profound revelations in this meandering. More than anything, it feels like an internal fight of equally rejecting and reminiscing parts of a past lived experience that now seems so far removed from my current being, that even what lies ahead feels foreign, yet oddly mundane, here in New Orleans.
We don’t have complete ways of processing memories in the very moment, therefore re-assessing the past gives one an easier opportunity to supply memories—whether they be positive/negative or realistic/fiction—in hopes to better understand where we’ve been and where we are going.
In the coming months and years, and in an attempt to activate this online space in ways other than simply being a ‘design portfolio,’ I hope to investigate a number of topics, inspirations, projects, and opinions that may contribute to a deeper understanding of this feeling, disconnectedness, inevitable change, tangibility, and ‘the ‘design as service. ’