Welcome to this weeks Studio Notes week 47 of 52 in 2025. Perhaps my excitement towards the end of the year is the fact I’ll have completed a commitment to doing these posts for a year or maybe it’s that I’m committed to a four day week for the rest of the year.
I structure my weekly notes as reflection, insights, a question for you, resources and a view to the week ahead. They started life as strict business notes inspired by service designer practice on projects of keeping weekly notes on what’s been happening on specific project work.
How was your week?
Mine was pretty good but it did not all go well. However I spent a full day in flow and yes it was amazing! Let’s jump in.
Reflection
On one level it was a brilliant week and then there is the offsets, struggles and hard things. That’s ok it’s life. More the point it’s how we navigate adapt and build our resilience muscle to move through, around and be present to all of what becomes us.
I’ve written a load of words about the struggle and strife this week then I deleted them.
I’ve been working with clients discussing and focusing on what’s strong not what’s wrong. So let’s have that as a harbour.
My week was intense, a new associate team to respond to an educational decolonisation tender, an interview, a full day event facilitation (designed over 5 weeks) with TCD & ISSN on sustainability education in schools, client research report rewrite.
Two days in Dublin went well. It suits me.
It really was an irregularly shaped week. There was another tender I had identified to work on with an associate, I took that off my desk Monday knowing I’d more than enough to do.
The wrangling of no wifi in my home office for a whole week was challenging. I did consider working at our local remote hub but did n’t.
The national procurement website, etenders is challenging to work with let alone being pushed to mobile to upload a response to a tender. Not a good look on anyone but especially not me at 11:30pm on a Tuesday night. Having issues with tech adds to stress.
Tender documents take time, a lot more than you think, know or might ever consider. I had brought two other micro enterprises together for the 3 of us to form a consortium for delivering training. I was not totally happy with the quality of documentation we had produced but I wanted us to go for it, it was a strong team. The quality of what we produced was in proportion to the time we had available. I did not get it loaded into the portal on time. I let the team down, technically it was beyond frustrating. On my I pad it locked me out of my etenders account punching me to my mobile, nuts and yes impossible as it turned out.
I’ve been working 2 days in one for a few weeks now and some weekends. At some stage the wheels come off or it all comes good… right?
Maybe both happen and it’s a variation of chitty chitty bang bang, the movie. The bit where the car flies or the breakfast gets made by an inventors every day object machine not the bit with the weird creepy child catcher. My childhood stories seemed very alive earlier this week. I wondered about the shaping of young minds through films, stories, poems and songs.
On my desk and in my phone are a long list of tasks. But YAY! I am getting through the,.
Last week prepped for an interview. I made myself an interview guide book – notes from the annual report, research, trawling through their website, searches and thoughts, questions etc. I develop notes when applying for jobs but a booklet felt good to create and made the prep easier. I do like being organised. I think the interview went well. It was a lot for 1 hour and included a presentation. I enjoyed the interview, it would be an amazing opportunity. However it just might never happen…
My voluntary yeses and stretches have gone by the way side with literally no time to respond because of work, job hunting and business development.
As of this week I have 3 small pieces of work booked in my diary. They have tiny budgets but are lovely
- Festine Lente’s Social Horticulture 2025 Cohort just before their final assessment – bringing a zoomed out approach and perspective through nature based mindfulness, systems awareness and reclaiming the economy – early December
- DLR Artist and Creatives Literacy Series part 4 – Futures, so yes there will be time travel involved – January 2026.
- Graphic design for an Aging Well Workshop worksheet. Someone who I’ve hired several times is delivering a workshop, she’s commented several times on the small group worksheets I develop for strategic design workshops. It’s part of my approach when designing workshops to capture break out smaller conversions in an artefact. Deadline is this week. I’m excited to design something for someone else.
I spent all of Thursday in flow! Yes can you imagine a whole day. It was amazing, being well prepared and having your whole event team, facilitators, photographers, graphic recorder, speakers all aligned with a good playbook is in my experience the best way to deliver a successful workshop and facilitation. Over the year of designing innovation experiences, workshops, days, events I’ve learned how to make the invisible visible so everyone knows what’s what. But there is something about how grounded I felt last Thursday, it allowed me to be present with 50 other people so we could
- open up and presence to the best of ourselves, nurture human nature
- innovate together,
- share knowledge
- think and disrupt ourselves
- Time travel
- Connect and collaborate
The time traveling was something I felt a bit nervous about doing. I created and prototyped my first device with thanks to Rob Hopkins open source technology.
I will share more about this piece of work at some stage for now I have a quiet contentment about a job well done.
Friday I switched gears or tried to but my brain resisted and I ended up working the weekend to complete the SFI report which I had to completely rewrite because I did something weird in the data analysis. Key learning point for me don’t just accept a .cv file dumped from survey monkey ask for access to the survey monkey automated reports. Plus iron that detail out early. What was I thinking? Data and data visualisation is something I’d like to be better at. I can hear my Da, laughing from beyond the grave. He was a statistician, one of his earlier career jobs was to do statistical analysis of trials in an agricultural R&D lab in North County Dublin. I have vivid memories of him sharing his early work on trials for commercial growing of carnations and mushrooms. It was better to be the first person doing the analysis rather than checking and correcting someone else’s work. With his mischievous laugh he add the lads in Kinsealy were fixing his errors for months after he left.
So I was fixing my own errors, which included 80% of my work on the report. It’s a better report now.
Insights
When your instinct says to take something off your table do it. Call it early let others and yourself off to spend your energy else where.
Early in the week I recognised I was over extending my over extended capacity. I also did not attend the Lady’s Island talk by Elaine Goff Monday that I had really wanted to go to.
I need to hear new information 2 – 3 times before I can activate it for strategic and design work. Often that’s
- New to me information – listening or reading. Surface to midrange depth.
- Assimilation of information and clarification of significant 5 W’s – the who, what, why, where and when. Mid-range to deep knowledge.
- Clarification and understanding often in a playback environment with a client or through a proposal response document.
I’ve known about this 2-3 time information loop for a while but I’m defining it as part of my professional operating system.
Because I have a daily practice of ecologies I am more grounded. During times when I am working with others and they are feeling stressed or off kilter I can be present to that and support them. Grounding and soothing our nervous system so we can be present helps us show up as our true selves. Having developed several practices that keep me well and sustained including this weekly reflection here I have better perspectives and am managing my wellbeing better. Not perfectly but also not abandoning myself.
Time travel does need a bit of theatre, I think it works better when we attend to our senses, breathe into the space ourselves and open up to full weird possibilities.
All those terrifying episodes of Dr Who where I watched from behind a chair as a small kid are finally paying off. I’ve really started to consider what a time travel device looks and sounds like…
A question for you
What do you think a time travel device should sound like?
Resources
‘Domain of the Dinosaurs’ Irelands Dinosaurs exhibition in the Glucksman in Cork. “Ireland has lots of fossils that are important globally.” Is this in relation to our politicians? No seriously go discover our fossils and the story being told.
Also in Cork the brilliant exhibition by Jools Gilson, Mapping Climate Change: The Knitting Map and The Tempestry Project until December 6 at Horgan’s Quay, near Kent railway station.
Keeping it really local, Elaine McGoff has been keeping it real on the airwaves as well as by Lady’s Island.
From Nature Journal, Waste not: how researchers harness pee and poo for science. Don’t know if you recall around the Pandemic there was a whole raft of science about predicting the next outbreak through waste water analysis. The nerdy futurist in me is fascinated about what powers prediction – science, maths, delusion, imagination. So this article was really interesting.
There were two cartoons/graphics this week I really enjoyed:
A view to the week ahead
I’ve that bit of tasty graphic design work to do Monday.
Lots of business administration and book keeping to do.
Mostly I am not burdened with being overtly busy, lol it’s taken me two days extra to publish my studio notes. But that’s a self imposed deadline and no one else really cares so big woop.
Friday I’m in Cork, I love Cork, excited to go.
There is the Wexford PPN AGM and some training to attend.
What else, I dunno I am open to opportunities!
Have a great week.
Roisin Markham 
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