Week 06 2023

Two papers in one week.

This week was one of the most chaotic weeks I’ve had in years. I packed the week so full that I got up at 3 a.m. two mornings to write. I’m not even sure if what I wrote was good.

Okay, I take it back, I think it was good.

Through the ordeal, I was reminded of how much I love to write and how writing works out ideas on-the-fly. Turning ideas in my head into words that communicate is not just an act of translation—it’s a cycle of synthesis and expansion. The ideas congeal into words, but while doing so, I often back away from an idea for a moment of “okay, what does that idea really mean, and how does it connect to other concepts?”

I submitted a paper to the Journal of Futures Studies this week, and in it, I nested processes used by Futures Studies into the five-step design thinking process. Before writing the paper, I had never written about how both worked together. I’ve used the combination in my courses before but had never articulated it in writing. By writing it, I had to know it. That’s the magic of writing—it challenges you to think critically about and know the content. When I write, my ideas and connections between them expand and then become focused on the page. Unfortunately, it also means that the expansion of thinking usually produces a lot of words—sometimes way more than the word limit.

Next reflection… I may have to write about editing.