Midterm presentation classmate question

Olivia: Your idea of a website is great but it seems like it would be A LOT to create a full website. How do you plan on regulating the amount of work you do and the information on the website?

It is a lot! I spend an enormous number of hours making my websites—while I sometimes compress those hours into too-few days, there’s no getting around that like any other substantial piece of art, dozens of hours have to go in. Looking back at my best projects from 2020, the majority were similarly substantial.

In 2020 I wrote Production Value Changes the Product, about my constant battle with ever-increasing personal standards for my work. (The piece is more technical than necessary; I wrote it in a different context.) As I’ve done larger projects of higher quality over the years, I hesitate to do smaller, more throwaway projects because it can feel like I’m not moving forward, not doing constantly bigger & better things. This is a mental trap: if you exclusively scale up projects, you end up skipping the vital part of the creative process that is small-scale experimentation. Big-budget, multi-year, or high-end work has its place, but some projects should be explored for a few hours to exercise your brain. For this project, it should land somewhere in between: I’m spending substantial effort on each of the research, thinking, execution, & iteration stages of it, but it’s within the scope of limited weeks & not the sole focus of my life like a full-time work project would be.

The primary balancing strategy for scoping this project is limiting its subject matter coverage without compromising its form. I previously wrote: It doesn’t need to—it can’t—capture nearly everything, so I’ll zoom into a few specific areas. Transportation & energy are ones I intend to focus on, as I think our mindset could shift in unexpected ways with wholly new systems in those areas.

Similar to the world an excellent musical single can create in 3 minutes through its production & the energy of vocal delivery & other aspects, I’m striving to make a project covering a few aspects of our future world with an energy that gives a compelling sense of vision covering more than it discusses. Balancing length & depth & time spent on a project never becomes easy no matter how much you work on it, but scoping is the essential force to get a creative project to a publishable endpoint.