It's been almost four years since I've touched anything related to Method of Action. My day job at Cabify was a good excuse for placing my personal-professional pursuits on the backburner, so paused my online presence while I enjoyed the stability of salaried work.

Though Cabify is hands down the best workplace I've encountered, I found myself itching to pursue more personal and creative work, so I left the company a couple months ago. Cabify houses a truly healthy company culture with a zesty Spanish flavor. In retrospect it's amazing we could raise to unicorn status not only within completely sane work days, but also have a lot of fun along the way. They are always hiring, in case you are seeking a good place to thrive professionally.

As I come back to revive my creative pursuits and online presences, it becomes clear that there was a lot of fragmentation, and it's best to focus my energy into a single venture. I have a personal presence (duopixel) and a professional presence (Method of Action), and each has it's own social media accounts. Additionally--during most of it's active life--Method of Action was a joint-venture with Maria Munuera, so this becomes a real-world merge conflict.

For those of you unfamiliar with the project, I'll briefly skim over it's history. Method of Action was a stab at teaching design by practice. For this we made a couple of design games that went viral, and designed an online course with design challenges for students to complete through the use of a vector drawing app named Method Draw. Plans fell through when we suffered data loss, and it was decided that the project was too ambitious for our resources. Eventually we went separate ways and settled into more traditional roles within companies, and Method of Action was left abandoned for a number of years.

Though of very little interest to the casual reader, the reason for this post is to explain how and why I'm choosing to rescue it from the graveyard. It is ethically important for me to work out the merge publicly, otherwise I'd be appropriating undue work and sweeping dust under the carpet. It's time to clean-up the abandoned house before refurnishing it.


Authorship

CONFLICT [authorship]: Merge conflict in authors

María is a great friend, and the collaboration we had under Method of Action goes well beyond what is visible in the product. The split made me hesitant to put more effort into Method of Action, as I held custody but not exclusive entitlement to the project. This made the gears grind to a standstill.

So I reached out to her and explained what I wanted to do. Fortunately she was cool with it, and we worked out a way in which we could go separate ways while acknowledging the collaboration. You can check out her online presence at:

Twitter twitter.com/doctoraw
LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/doctoraw
Medium medium.com/@doctoraw/
Portfolio mariamunuera.com

In order to fully acknowlege her work on Method of Action, I have set up a separate historical about page which covers the years we collaborated. And because her work has professional value, I'm also keeping the product of our collaboration intact. If I were to extend a game for example, the extended game will sprout from a different seed (new design and code) and reside on a different domain.

María is a top-notch professional, a very talented designer, and most importantly: an amazing human being. María, may the path you're walking now yields bountiful fruit. It was my pleasure and my privilege to share this with you.

commit -m "Resolved conflict by giving credit over shared work, and stating that from now on the author is Mark MacKay."

Topics

CONFLICT [content]: Merge conflict in topics

In former years my thought was almost exclusively dedicated to the domain of design. Or, at least I found a way of connecting personal experience to professional relevance. Nowadays I allow myself to drift in the direction of curiosity, and sometimes this is related to design. Yet, I when I sit down to write about it, self-consciousness gets the best of me because I am accustomed to publishing only about the professional aspect of life. This constipation needs to be addressed.

Design hasn't ceased to be a domain of interest for me, but as my interests have expanded, I haven't found an outlet for the creative work required to appropriately digest what I consume. Many of the things I consume come from a hunger produced by an existential crisis, and I'm glad I have waited until now to write about it, because it allowed me to untangle that which is relevant to me as a person from that which is relevant to me as a human being.

Though now I feel I now hold nothing of myself as secret, I sense that my personal story is completely irrelevant. It would only be useful to write about it as a form of self-therapy, but that's what personal journals are for. Only what's relevant to me as a human being is also useful for other people. These explorations have a lot to do with the sense identity and how to simplify all these fragmented aspects of being into a single integrated expression of the self. To reduce the inner equation to its minimal and most elegant expression, so to speak.

This, of course, is better demonstrated rather than explained, and this post is an exercise of putting my intentions into action.

commit -m "Resolved conflict by making content schema more flexible"

Language

CONFLICT [language]: Languages do not match

I was born in Canada, grew up in Mexico, and currently live in Spain. As is the case of most bilingual people, much of the information I consume is in English. Depeding on the topic I'm writing about, I might write in English or Spanish. I find the situation insatisfactory, because again it fragments one's body of work, while still thinking it's important that the great diversity of languages and cultures is represented on the internet.

Translating my own writing is a chore which would take time out of creative work. Yet, I mantained a blog in Spanish during six years, and in my efforts of simplification I find myself unwilling to simply allow everything I wrote in Spanish drift off into oblivion. Before this happens, in periods of low creative energy I will translate and incorporate into this blog that which I still find relevant and useful.

Regarding the importance of expressing of one's own culture and language on the internet, I think it is more valuable to express one's culture and opinions in the lingua franca of the medium. My opinion about corruption in Mexico, for example, adds very little value in the Mexican echo chamber, but is perhaps more valuable to a foreign observer. Though I seldom write about society issues, I find myself thinking more about how it relates to individual development. Where I would usually write about this topic in Spanish, I'll now write it in English.

commit -m "Resolved conflict by choosing English as the language I use to communicate online, I will translate and merge Spanish content from the past as time allows."

Social Media

CONFLICT [online identity]: Singleton instance should be unique

Some time ago I became nauseated of everything I saw in social media. Everybody's been there: Facebook's timeline is noise, dozens of invitations to connect on LinkedIn from people you don't know, reading your Twitter timeline leaves you in a daze. After detox I see this had more to do with my own state of mind rather than objective reality, but I will write about this later.

Leaving the privacy scandals aside, what concerns me at this time is the fragmentation experienced by using these services. What is the source of truth: my online portfolio or LinkedIn? Should people see what I'm up to on my Instagram, or on my blog? Should opinions belong on Twitter? I wish to have a single source of truth, and yet to be able to reach out to people because social media is the contemprary feed reader.

To dislike social media and yet use it to promote your work seems hypocritical, like an antisocial person who assists a party only to network and to speak about himself. This kind of half-hearted engagement only adds more poison to the stream. But, paying attention on who uses social media correctly, I've gleaned on healthy ways to engage with it. Since I will consolidate all online presence under Method of Action, I'm closing my personal Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts (they've been abandoned for years anyways).

I'm not entirely sure how to address this at this time, so I will start small and from experience: my only form of broadcasting will be done through Twitter, and I will behave like a human being and not a bot (I sometimes lurk even when mentioned). All this is subject to change, I've been avoiding social media for years now and want to get a good grasp on it before deciding what should be done about it.

If you wish to speak to me directly, you can reach me out at:

commit -m "Resolved conflict by publishing everything I create under the method.ac domain, considering this the single source of truth and re-engaging with social media in a healthy way."

Whew, that was a tough merge.

What comes next?

From experience I know that calling out shots often results in airballs. I currently narrate my days in my Work Journal where you can glimpse the direction I'm working on, but nothing is announced until it ships.

Thanks for reading!