Documenting The Process

Image: Dawn in Mexico City 2017, Matt Schell

I am always working and making stuff, but it’s not always visible. That’s because a lot of the work I do gets discarded at some point because it doesn’t work out or go anywhere, experiments, prototypes, small ideas. In a way it’s a shame because just as I learn things from those experiments, others might as well. So I am trying to get better at being more transparent and documenting my process. Of course this is a bit scary, the ego doesn’t really want to let people into it’s secret lair and show the outside world the mess. But I think overcoming that is worthwhile and bringing people into your work is worth it. This blog is an attempt in that direction, though it’s focus is more holistic and less on the individual projects etc that I’m working on. For the more granular technical details, I have my YouTube channel which I’ve restarted and tried to be more consistent on. Again, I am resisting the desire there to make perfectly packaged content (for example nice concise tutorials) and instead just bring people into my process and showing them what’s being worked on. It started with the release of my procedural generation asset Strata, and still circles around that a lot since that’s my main current released project, but it also shows some of the other small experiments I’m working on and making as well.

The value of creating this kind of secondary documentation work (which takes work and effort, to be sure) is that it crystallizes the process and creates a secondary product that will survive and be valuable (hopefully) even if the main project / product turns out to be unsuccessful. In fact it’s probably particularly interesting to see the process go wrong for others, from a learning perspective. “Learn from other people’s mistakes” as they say. In a sense documenting your process can serve as a kind of hedge against the risk of an unsuccessful project. If the project itself is unsuccessful, there is at least some useful learning that may come out of it for others. I think creating process documentation also encourages reflection during work, and therefore probably helps one to digest and perhaps reveal additional insights, both during the creation process and after the fact. Writing this blog and making YouTube videos about my recent stuff has been useful in that sense.

Importantly in both cases the documentation is public. This has an additional value of creating a degree of accountability in which I am publicly promising and committing to do work, and therefore feel I will disappoint some people if I give in to the temptation to give up. We all respond differently to this kind of social perspective but I know for me the idea of missing deadlines or having projects collapse publicly stings much more than silently and privately giving up on stuff. So for solo practitioners like myself, this kind of public blogging or video creation is a way to create some degree of public social accountability, which you may also find valuable.