Portland art museum: illustrating what informaticists do with hard physical labor

Omg if only people could see how hard informatics work is. It FEELS as hard as this.

As a retiree, I have been traveling and volunteering more than I used to when working. 

I was recently in Portland, Oregon at an informatics meeting. When I was there, I had a chance to explore the Portland Art Museum. One of the exhibits I loved was about photography and this one photograph really spoke to me. The image was of iron workers, welding, and shaping metal in an iron foundry. Just look at those “physically taxing” moments. 

I found it remarkable how you could see and feel how hard these workers were going at their jobs. In contrast, I feel like Informaticists work equally hard with their brains at their laptops and in design sessions thinking about the sociopolitics of how to deploy a new tool effectively. However, at the end of the day when you go home, you either have a clean desk or a messy desk and no sense of how hard you worked.

Separately, I was recently volunteering at the Food Bank of the Rockies, and I so enjoyed working with my hands and doing moderately complex sorting in small teams, taking large boxes of donations and breaking them down into usable and non-usable cans of vegetables, personal products, clothing, water, other types of drinks, and then helping to repackage them in useful ways. You could see the work progress progressing as the unsorted boxes disappeared and materials moved into well sorted bins. We all felt a sense of accomplishment from the physical work.

CMIO’s take? In the past I would use a Pomodoro Timer, or even paperclips being moved every half hour from one cup to another to symbolize work being accomplished, and have a sense of completion. Do you do something similar to generate small dopamine hits of achievement? How do you sustain your motivation? How do you represent the hard work you do?