Get weird again

About a thousand years ago in internet time (2011), I started a blog. 

I’d just come home from the very first Confab in Minneapolis—a whole conference devoted to nothing but UX content, in a moment where most people I talked to had no idea what that even was?!? It felt like a dream: A summer camp for people who were nerdy in the same ways I was. Who wanted to figure out what this field was and could be. Who were delighted—over the moon—to finally be in community with others who thought like them. 

Before I’d even emptied my suitcase, I started writing. I was inspired by what I’d heard, and I wanted to be part of what came next. I wanted to share what I’d learned in my years building a scrappy UX and content strategy practice at my then-company. I wanted to add to the body of knowledge, help mature the discipline. 

I wanted to be part of something. 

Blogging about UX wasn’t an obvious career move. It wasn’t going to get me promoted. I wasn’t monetizing anything. It was just interesting. 

That’s how I made a lot of professional choices in those years: following my interests. When something piqued my curiosity or made me see the world differently, I dug in. I read, I experimented, I wrote about it. I said yes to all sorts of stuff—contributing to people’s indie publications, organizing meetups, having coffee chats and mentoring calls with strangers. I learned tons, I built friendships I still cherish, and I spent my days energized. 

I don’t mean to wax nostalgic about a bygone era. There were plenty of problems back then, too. And I suspect that even if UX as a field hadn’t changed dramatically in the past 15 years, the energy I had for it would have. Most people don’t keep the same gusto for extracurriculars in their forties that they had in their twenties. But there is something from that era in UX that I would love to find more of again this year. 

Space to get weird. 

What I mean by that is space to think about work-adjacent topics that’s curiosity-driven, not just career-driven. That’s focused on experimentation and exploration, not just projecting the “right” image to a hiring manager, or crafting the “ideal” portfolio. Space to play, to have healthy debates, to share half-baked ideas or sometimes just shoot the shit. 

And I get it: it might not be intuitive to make space for fun when your industry has contracted, and performance reviews have become cutthroat, and the fantasy of AI being able to do your job has your CEO frothing for more layoffs. It’s hard to see “following your interests” as a realistic idea when you’re worried about rising housing costs and crashing economies and crushing fascism. 

But hear me out: What if that’s precisely why we should get weird right now? 

UX has spent most of the past 15 years professionalizing—creating career ladders, normalizing job titles, defining the damn thing. And despite the doom and gloom in the air right now, I think it’s important to acknowledge that all this professionalization worked. UX became a job title at literally thousands of companies. Teams grew. Sub-disciplines emerged. What was once a “make it up as you go” profession filled with scrappy misfits—former librarians, developers tired of building unusable software, ex-academic researchers, copywriters who loved systems thinking, you name it—became a legitimate, often well-paid career for an untold number of people.

I don’t want to undercut any of that. Jobs, stability, growth opportunities: these things matter. 

But as I think about the last few years in the field, I can’t help but wonder: Are people enjoying these professionalized careers? Fulfilled in the work they’re doing? 

Are they happier?

Not from where I’m sitting. Instead, I see a great many people wondering whether this is still a field they want to be part of. I see sky-high burnout, crises of confidence, and the endless slog to “prove your value” inside of organizations that do not actually value UX—that, if we’re being honest, cannot value UX, because their business models aren’t built around delivering a useful, usable product to their users.  

And yet, a lot of those same people go blank when trying to imagine anything else they might do with their lives. They might idly dream of becoming therapists or opening a café—but the realities of those paths quickly feel unrealistic: too much time, too much student debt, too low of a salary, too much risk. And so they tell themselves to just suck it up. Grit through it. Do whatever it takes to get and keep a job at a company they hate, doing work that feels emptier and emptier. 

This is why I think we need to get weird again—to create spaces for UX and design-adjacent things that aren’t driven purely by a desire to be professionally legible. Because even if we do want to remain desirable in the current job market, putting every ounce of ourselves into that goal is exhausting. It flattens us, turns us into little business automatons. It leaves us empty. 

But when we let ourselves be weirder and wilder with our skills—when we reclaim those skills for ourselves, and not just for our career progression—I think some important things can happen. 

We can start to remember why we value our skills—even if our companies don’t.

We can start to connect with other people like us—people who are interested in building a professional life that’s meaty and substantive and interesting. 

And we can expand our sense of what’s possible. Because when we peek into different communities, different industries, and different types of organizations, we start to see new directions our work could take. New opportunities we’d have missed if we stayed in our bubbles. New futures we simply couldn’t previously imagine.  

As Anil Dash said earlier this week, in his post on how the hell to have a tech career in 2026, “most tech isn’t ‘tech’”: 

I see a lot of people afraid to reach beyond the world of big tech, startups, and corporate spaces, though. Afraid of what their peers might think, afraid of “getting left behind,” afraid it means they’ve failed at the big leagues. 

But I also know many people on the other side. 

One joined local government, where they’re using the design and research skills they honed in digital spaces to make things better for constituents in some extremely offline ways. 

Another transitioned from a corporate layoff to a nonprofit they’d never have had on their radar before—and is now enjoying a relaxed organizational culture full of realistic timeframes and an honest commitment to their users. 

I know countless more who have started their own businesses, using the skills they honed in UX and design in all kinds of ways (I count myself among them). 

But all those shifts start with giving yourself permission to imagine new, different things. And to do that? I’ve found no better way than by creating something. 

For me, it was a community and event series called Collective Strength, which I ran with Katel LeDû pre-pandemic. I couldn’t have predicted at the time that it would lead me to create Active Voice. But I’d have never gotten here without having space to experiment with a version of leadership rooted in feminist values (not just girlboss capitalism).    

For one of our Throughline speakers, Ida Persson, it’s DesignShifts—a project “for anyone who sees the harm in our current systems and wants to be part of shifting toward something better.” The result is a website, a writing project, an art project, a community, a workshop series… and who knows what else.  

Or maybe it’s simply to have fun—like when another one of our speakers, Erika Hall, started posting her chicken illustrations online, and then turned it into a website where you can vote on which chicken is more debonair. Or more persnickety. Or more impertinent.

You can’t tell me Clickens isn’t weird. And you also can’t tell me it doesn’t make your day a little better.

Whatever your weird might be, what would it look like to let yourself explore it this year? 

I have at least one client who’s actually made that their primary 2026 goal—not a promotion, not a pivot, not a side hustle. But rather: figuring out what their creative practice might look like, outside of their 9-to-5. How can they create space to play with all those design skills they’ve honed that’s just for them, not for their company? 

These kinds of projects, and the connections and community they create, probably aren’t on a hiring manager’s radar, or listed in a leveling matrix. But if you’re feeling disaffected and dissatisfied at work—or flummoxed in the job market—I actually think they might be the best first step to figuring out where to take your career from here.  

But because getting weird—tapping into your curiosity, meeting people outside your bubble, creating internet art, writing stuff that’s not packaged up into a pithy LinkedIn post—will simply make your brain work differently. And you won’t know what’s on the other side of that until you try it. 

Ultimately, I believe that design and UX and all their sub-disciplines and sibling fields aren’t just job titles to be sought within specific companies or industries. They’re a broad collection of skillsets and methods, mindsets and ways of working, that—when applied with humility and expansiveness—can prepare us to solve meaningful problems all over the place. Not just in big tech or startups, not just within user interfaces—but wherever it is that things are broken. 

And so much is broken around us right now. There’s so much to be repaired. Which means we’re not at the end of design, or UX. We’re just evolving. 

At least, that’s what I hope for us. Because I refuse to believe that the peak of UX was the decade we spent turning every piece of decent software the world had ever seen into a shittier and more expensive SaaS product. 

We can do better. And we will. As soon as we let ourselves imagine it.