On  June 20th, 2008 I began this crazy creative journey. I was suffering through a bought of the post-project blues and upon encouragement from friends, I started a “creative recovery” treatment plan modeled after the structure and mantra of AA’s 90 meetings in 90 days. For 90 days, I committed to thinking about, sketching, drawing, and prototyping ideas about mobile design and user experience. I posted the ideas to this blog each and every day. Like folks recovering from any addiction, I didn’t know what is at the end of those 90 days, but I had faith that something good was on the other side… and there was.

Here is what I learned.

Creative Outlets
Addiction is the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice, so much so that cessation causes severe trauma. There’s a razor thin line between addiction and passion and I started this project questioning if I had crossed that line. My biggest fear was being identified as a workaholic – a person with no sense of self outside of my vocation because I lacked the discipline to enforce boundaries between my personal and professional selves. I thought I might be addicted to my work.  Instead, I discovered through this journey I am passionate about ideas… and I learned that my ideas need outlets.

I began the project feeling blue, and was surprised at how quickly those feelings of sadness and loss disappeared once I started the 90 in 90 project. The daily ritual of giving myself the space and time to explore my thoughts was liberating. Giving form to my ideas through writing or sketching was more than fun, it was pure joy. I realized that my head was full of ideas and the 90 in 90 project gave those ideas a place to go. I soon discovered the feelings of sadness and loss I had felt were not caused by some project coming to an end – they were caused by the loss of a creative outlet.

The design profession has a built-in outlet for ideas – but projects and professional work is riddled with boundaries and constraints. So many ideas feel abandoned and left on the cutting room floor. After three years of working in the mobile industry, there were tons of ideas that I had thought I’d abandoned because they didn’t fit into a project. I hadn’t abandoned them, though. Those ideas were trapped in my mind, left to haunt and torture me - stuck, unexplored, undocumented, unborn with nowhere to go. I’ve realized that ideas belong in the world. The act of writing them down and giving them form gave my ideas somewhere to go - it gave them a sense of life and vibrancy; a movement and velocity. Ideas need a space to be explored, shared and built on – and creative outlets provide the environment to do just that. Work had become my primary creative outlet and I realized I simply needed more outlets … many more.

90 Mobiles in 90 Days served as a creative outlet, but it also caused me to rediscover dormant creative outlets – drawing, photography, painting and writing – and the role they play in my life. I quickly came to realize that I *need* these outlets - these places and environments to explore ideas in order to feel happy and fulfilled – for my well-being. This project allowed me to revive those outlets and nurture them. Since this project, I realized that my daily basics are sleeping, eating, exercising … and creating.

A Template for Creative Practice
Back when I studied fine art in college, I had a painting professor who assigned the class the task of painting 30 paintings in a week. Seven days and a demoralizing critique later, she told us the point of the exercise was not to produce brilliant work, but to give us a template for a creative practice. She believed in the law of averages — the more you paint, the better chance you will have at creating something great. She encouraged us to be prolific and success would follow.

When I started 90 in 90, I felt stuck. I knew I had ideas that I wanted to express and share, but I didn’t know where to begin. I wanted the ideas to be good… brilliant in fact, and the pressure I put on myself to only share good ideas became paralyzing. For a good long while, I allowed the ideas to wallow in the shadows of mind and it became the ultimate downer. Inertia set in.

Committing to creating something everyday for 90 days was daunting, but the alternative was to be held hostage by the ideas in my head. In the end, the choice was easy: sit around and feel bad, or direct that energy into something productive. Starting 90 in 90 was like taking a deep breath and leaping forward. It created momentum.

Admittedly, some of the ideas from 90 mobiles in 90 days are brilliant, others are pretty good, and some of them simply stink. Instead of getting hung up on evaluating the ideas, I focused on the practice of doing something everyday.  I couldn’t predict when brilliant ideas would strike, but I realized the process and the practice of thinking about it everyday was making space for the opportunity for something great to happen. In making lots of stuff, I increased my odds of something magical happening. I became prolific.

Moreover, by committing to doing something for 90 days, I was bound to get better at it. Thinking about mobile user experience became habitualized; almost like an itch I had to scratch. This project made me a better writer. My drawing skills improved. It helped me clarify the things about mobile user experience that matter to me. It helped my find my point of view about mobile user experience.

Silencing My Inner Critic and Finding My Tribe
The initial decision to carry out this project online in a public forum was probably one of the most terrifying aspects initially. I was scared. What if my ideas were dumb? What if I write something stupid? What if everything I posted had already been thought of? Do I really have anything interesting to say? These were the questions that ate away at me until I remembered something my old figure skating coach once told me. “You are your own worst critic. Nobody is harder on you than you.” He was right. Many times throughout my life I have come face to face with my own worst enemy. I see her every time I look in the mirror because she is me.

I quickly realized that silencing that inner critic would be quite possibly the biggest and most daunting part of this challenge. If I kept the project to myself, I would be left alone to contend with that critical voice. I decided to share these ideas in a public forum instead of leave them to brutality of my own internal judge and jury.

That inner critic was quickly tempered by the encouragement of people who followed me along on this journey. People who read my blog emailed me, cheered me on with their comments and words of encouragement. My inner critic became powerless when people told me I had inspired them. In silencing my inner critic, I found my voice. With the support and encouragement of the people who followed along, I found the courage to use it.

More importantly, the ideas served as a bridge for connecting me with people who share my interests and passions. In sharing my ideas and point of view, I was connected with a tribe of people interested in nurturing, supporting and celebrating ideas about mobile user experience. This project allowed me to become part of that conversation… and part of that tribe.

Plus, the ideas just got better. Sharing my ideas with the world allowed them to have a life of their own. They were free to connect with other ideas and build into a host of other conversations. Even when people disagreed with a concept or an opinion, it started a conversation. Ideas get better with debate. Ideas get better when others are able to build on them. 90 mobiles in 90 days  became less about authorship and “my ideas”, and more about contributing to a community of thought. 90 and 90 allowed me to connect to something bigger than myself – a tribe of people who are interested in building the future of mobile user experiences.

Renewed engagement with the world
In the process of coming up with an idea a day about mobile experience every day for 90 days, I became aware of where inspiration comes from. Anywhere. Admittedly and obviously, a lot of the ideas were born out of first hand experiences in mobile contexts – waiting for the bus, walking down the street, waiting at an airport. But inspiration also came from unexpected places. I was inspired by architecture, by kelp forests at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, by my niece. I never knew when inspiration would strike so I quickly learned that I needed to be open to the world – to the people and places around me – and that inspiration would follow.

As a result, this process has allowed me to forge a different relationship to the people, places and things that touch my daily life. I feel a lot more engaged with the world because I rely on it as a source of inspiration. This process has opened me up to people and conversations. I’ve become more engaged with my neighborhood, the city, with nature. This project has made me more observant and patient person. It made me more empathetic; it made me a better designer.

90 Mobiles in 90 Days started out as an exercise in creative recovery. When I started I didn’t know where it would end, I just had faith that in the practice of doing something everyday, something good would happen. And it did. I went on a creative journey, and in doing so, created a body of work that reflects the aspects of mobile user experience that I believe are important and emergent. I learned loads about myself as a person and as a designer.

When people ask me what others can learn from this project, I come back to the reasons why people take  journeys of any kind. Journeys allow us to explore, they allow us to discover; they can be arduous at times, and full of surprises and fun at others. Most importantly, though, journeys provide us with understanding about ourselves and our relationship to the world. The journeys themselves are often the least difficult part – more often it’s finding the courage to start.

I started by taking it one day at a time.