Personal
Things I do for their own sake.
These are not hobbies in the sense of filling time. They are where I get to be a beginner, and where the feedback is immediate and unsentimental. Most of what I believe about designed experience I first learned at a table, losing.
Mahjong
Singapore mahjong is a scoring system pretending to be a tile game. A game held together almost entirely by undocumented convention is a small, complete study in tacit knowledge — and a decent argument for why documentation is design work.
mahjong.geraldajam.comContract bridge
The best-designed information problem I know of that you can finish in an evening. Bidding is a constrained language — a small set of legal utterances, all public, all ambiguous — and both partners have to build a shared picture using only those, while two opponents listen in.
Cartoons
A single panel has to carry setup, character, and turn simultaneously, which makes it the most unforgiving compression problem in visual communication — and the closest thing I know to a diagram with a sense of humour.
Trying new tech
I poke at new tools by building something small and slightly too ambitious with them, on the theory that you cannot evaluate a tool from its documentation. Most attempts do not survive, which is the point — the fast, cheap failure is the finding.
Pursuits is what I do. The library is what I point to — other people’s work I would recommend. Mahjong, bridge, and cartoons appear in both, correctly: one is the practice, the other is what taught me.