Do you think a depressed person could make this?
Hi friend,
Hit a bit of a rough patch in ye old mental health garden these past few weeks. Trying to work through it. It can be hard, when I’m low, to work on the stuff I want and need to. But as an industrious sort of person, depressed or not, I can sometimes marshal my energies toward something, a la Ben’s Do you think a depressed person could make this? stop motion film on Parks & Rec.
So: Could a depressed person make this?
Apparently, yes.
“This” is a new framework, ATOM (PDF), that spun out of my content strategy course. I was developing content for a lesson on how to choose and use content strategy tools, but none of the ways I'd organized them before was quite working. I’d tried the content strategy quad. I’d tried the typical plots of content strategy projects. I’d tried my own frameworks like VMT. I’d tried a mega-sorting of tools based on purpose or type or school of thought...this in particular was nearly impossible as so many tools and methods can be used to so many different ends, in so many different contexts.
I wanted to create an easy-to-teach framework to help me explain the things I find hard to explain—and the things that are frustrating when people I work with don’t understand them—about the tools and methods of design and digital strategy, among them:
- that you will probably not succeed with whatever template you just found if you aren’t familiar with the underlying methodology
- that the objects rendered with our tools—prototypes, inventories, models, etc.—are often not enough on their own to get the actual job done
- that the method by which we apply a given tool (are we using it solo? with a team? in a workshop? as part of a larger system?) has a significant influence on the outcomes
- that activities, such as mapping customer journeys or conducting user research, are not goals unto themselves
- that choosing creative, non-obvious and non-tired toolsets for your work is where a lot of the magic happens
- that there are often tools hidden inside our tools—such as lists, agendas, workshops, conversations—that quickly become invisible to practitioners, reducing our ability to use them effectively
And perhaps most importantly: that when teams dive into big activities like journey mapping, personas, content audits, and more without clear and shared understanding of why they're doing it and how best to approach it, a lot of time and money is about to be wasted.
ATOM is designed to help you do the right stuff for the right reasons. It's an acronym to help you remember: Aims, Tools, Objects, and Methods.
- Aims: What you actually want to accomplish, at a fundamental level, captured as singular core verbs like decide, persuade, design, publish.
- Tools: The specific templates, formats, frameworks, agendas, and other things that structure our work.
- Objects: Thoughtfully chosen artifacts you will render through work, distinct from the tools themselves. For instance, your customer journey map, versus customer journey mapping.
- Methods: The lens that shapes the work; a methodology, approach, or discipline that provides the “school of thought” from which our tools derive.
This version is more of a teaching and facilitation tool. I'm working on a version that could be used as a planning canvas. My notion is that you'd start with your initial instinct or attraction toward a given tool, object, or method, then fill in the rest from there. People get excited by something they learn about at a conference, like content modeling or design systems, then jump right into it without getting clear on why they’re doing it. An ATOM planning canvas would help mitigate against that, and help turn your instincts into actual plans.
Anyway, I thought I’d share what I have before my attention wanders, to see if it seems interesting to anyone else. What do you think? How do the terms strike you? Does this resemble something you already use? Hit me back, I’d love to know.
Hope you’re well out there.
Until next time,
Scott