Wow.  Truly brilliant article from Whitney Hess:  See For Yourself: About the Power of Observing.

At our core, interaction designers are anthropologists. We design interactions between people and people, and people and things. There is only one way to better understand people and better anticipate how they behave: observe.

The user experience profession is pretty weird. Some argue it isn’t a profession at all because you don’t need to belong to any associations or hold any certifications in order to call yourself a practitioner. We’re an occupation or concentration, or maybe we’re just a mindset.

I see us at an intersection, as a liaison. We combine principles of design, psychology, statistics and computer science to bring humanity into technology. Whether your day to day activities include drawing wireframes or interviewing prospective users or conducting usability tests, we are ultimately advocates for change — and in order to change the world, you have to see the world as it really is.

Most of my life I have been an avid people watcher.  I am constantly noting peoples movements and actions through life. I started doing this at a young age because I had issues with depth perception.  I needed to know what people were about to do, simply to move around in the world.  So, I note.. how people walk, what they look at and how it affects movement, etc.  Growing up around various religions and psychology, I can understand why people react to and do things the way they do. Years of this information has been taken in and assimilated, so I usually can predict what people are about to do spatially.. and comprehend the rest of why they do what they’ve done.

My problem is that I never found a way to put that information into words.. or even cohesive thought.  I know these things.. I just never developed a voice (even internally) enough to write things down or speak them.  I’ve thought about buying a journal for years in order to write stories that I have in my head, but I always talk myself out of it.  So, how does one develop this?

I wonder if I should just do as Whitney says, and force myself to write down those basics.. and maybe the rest will follow.