As my role at work seems to move further away from Actively Making Things and increasingly more towards Supporting Others in Making Things, I’ve been thinking a lot (perhaps, too much) about what this means for me as a person whose identity has been largely shaped by the act of making. Truthfully, I’ve been feeling a bit like a Broken Earthworm, one who has somehow managed to lose her ability to regenerate a new head or tail. I realize that slow progress is all part of the journey to grow and develop new skills that will help me to be more effective, and truthfully, learning how to be a better writer is very much part of my ongoing education.

But, at the same time, I’ve been trying to keep up my core craft skills through personal endeavors outside of work. I spent this past weekend iterating on my friends’ project to map their social network (earlier version viewable here). This is one such visualization representing the length of association of friends and family members. Each individual (arranged in alphabetical order) has been indicated as a raspberry line—the length of which has been determined by the number of years they’ve known one another. Content aside, the most satisfying moment for me came when I elected to use Adobe Illustrator’s Add Arrowhead filter to terminate each line in a circle, all performed with a single click. Insta-Dandelion!

For me, this small act underscored the importance for me to keep my tools sharp, because, like it or not, tools often drive form. And while I typically cringe when I recognize whiz-bang! effects applied with wild abandon, for now, an understanding of What’s Possible far outweighs Not Knowing.