Portfolio Creation

I have spent a good part of the past three weeks putting together a portfolio of my work, and have a few thoughts to share.

As I assembled my materials, I noticed a few themes that guide my creative process. I aim to explain them by referencing three people whose work has influenced me - Jeff Patton, Rick Rubin, and my dad, Doug VanEsselstyn.

In advance of laying out professional work, I did an initial exercise that highlighted personal projects, which I titled “Designs of Everyday Things” based, of course, on the Don Norman book. Putting a sample of these works together helped me recognize the following.

First, Jeff Patton. Jeff Patton is a designer who wrote the book, User Story Mapping which is perhaps my favorite UX book. I’ve worn out multiple copies (I just checked - bought it three times, surprised it hasn’t been more) and recommended it to others so many times. The Story Mapping process offers a user-centered way into product strategy, and an elegant, clear way into building roadmaps.

The biggest influence that Jeff’s work has had on me is not that book, however, it is his article that references “The Product Shaped Hole”.

I love this concept. My design style is almost entirely based in examining aspects of the world, and finding where there may be a gap - and then building up ideas that may fill that gap. It gets at the constant interplay between research and design, and I am fortunate to have acquired skills and discovered intuitions around finding and filling those holes.

My Amazon order history of User Story Mapping

Second, Rick Rubin. Rick Rubin produced the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill while he was an undergraduate at NYU. His book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being was introduced to me recently. I read the book in a single sitting and it felt as though he was speaking directly to me. His ability to capture the feeling of an idea striking, and his encouragement for channeling that creative energy and being a vessel for a larger creative force was strikingly familiar. It now sits on my living room coffee table. I pick it up and read portions at random. It inspires me, and gives me courage - honestly, more like a responsibility - to act on my creative ideas.

Third, my Dad. I grew up tinkering with my dad in his basement workshop, and we have built many things together. While I’ve gained considerable skills through apprenticing his carpentry and mechanical skills - it is really more of a cognitive apprenticeship around problem identification and problem solving that I’ve come to appreciate.

I can remember once going fishing with my dad and my friend Josh Reibel. We caught a few bluefish in Long Island Sound and returned to my folk’s place in Connecticut to clean them. My dad pulled out a garbage can and set it next to the street sewer drain near our hose, pulled out a carving board that he had custom built to fit on top of the can, cleaned a few fish, and then ran the hose washing the fish guts down the sewer.

Josh, who grew up fishing with his own dad in Long Island, shook his head and said to me, “This is incredible. You should see the messed up process that my dad and I go through when we clean fish.”

It was one of those little things that one takes for granted. But upon reflection, growing with my dad was an ongoing masterclass in service design, process optimization, and seeking to find and fill the “product shaped hole” with innovations and projects across our home and family. Evidence: this piece in Popular Mechanics where I (alongside Brad Pitt and many others) got to share a story about learning from one’s dad. There is much more to the story than the paragraph in the website, BTW, but the tip holds true.

Putting together my portfolio helped me once again appreciate that design work is not just design, it is rooted in curiosity - an almost constant search for a “product shaped hole”. That search and process of filling the hole can be so strong, that it is almost beyond one’s own personal boundaries and becomes a force larger than oneself, as Rick Rubin explains. And it helped me appreciate the overwhelming amount that I’ve gained from apprenticing under my dad’s unique way of coming at the world, and taming some part of it through creative problem solving.

I’m excited to share my “designs of everyday things” and hope you’ll enjoy.