Beck Tench is one of the most insightful people I know. You may know her from N.C.’s Museum of Life + Science, as a creative blogger at BeckTench.com, or as the organizer of a weekly ‘salon’ in Durham, North Carolina.

Her bio gives a good sense of her diverse background:

Beck Tench is a simplifier, illustrator, story teller and technologist. Formally trained as a graphics designer at the University of North Carolina’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, she has spent her career elbow deep in web work of all sorts — from the knowledge work of information architecture and design to the hands dirty work of writing code and testing user experiences. Currently, she serves as Director for Innovation and Digital Engagement at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, NC where she studies and experiments with how visitors and staff use technology to plan, enhance and share their everyday lives.

Beck’s also a catalyst — she and Phil Buckley inspired me to relaunch my blog earlier in 2010. I interviewed her last week via email. For more insights, follow her on Twitter or see her updates at BeckTench.com. While you’re at it, join the Museum — membership includes free reciprocal admission at 280+ science museums worldwide.

Beck Tench

Director for Innovation and Digital Engagement, Museum of Life + Science in Durham, NC
More info: @10ch, LinkedIn, and BeckTench.com

Winding Path: From a Job to a Career to a Calling

I noted that her work spans multiple areas, from web design to user experience to science education. I asked Beck how she got to where she is today, since graduating from UNC in 2001. She shared:

If we start in 2001 and chart the job security of web workers, I spy a trend that starts in the valley of a sine wave and peaks in 2003 and 2007. Not coincidentally, those two years mark major growth for me and my career.

In 2003 I took a position at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering, marking a change in how I viewed my web work: I had a career, now, not just a job. At Duke I was the quintessential webmaster. It was not unusual for me to divide my time between designing in Photoshop, writing custom (i.e. bad) PHP code for our website, sending an HTML newsletter in Thunderbird, updating the SVN repository on our webserver, creating an event advertisement for display on screens around campus, and meeting with a professor to discuss navigation and content on his or her research group website.

After four years of working the web from stem to stern, I was eager to specialize. In 2007 I went to work for an agency as an information architect. I learned quickly that I’m “mission monogamous” and wasn’t fulfilled spreading my ideas and time between several clients. Not two months after joining the agency, I was looking for new opportunities.

A couple months into my search I stumbled onto a position for an “Online Community Manager” at the Museum of Life and Science. I was hungry for mission and freedom and the museum was overflowing with both. After brainstorming with the person who’d soon become my boss, we created a position that combined what they’d been looking for with my prior experience and I joined the museum as their “Director of Web Experience.”

As my work at the museum merged more with exhibit development, learning and engagement began to direct my work more than the number of followers we had on Twitter or visitors we had on our website. My title changed to “Director for Innovation and Digital Engagement,” marking a second change in how I view my work: now a calling, not just a career.

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Identifying and Solving the Important Problems

During her compelling “Becoming an Agent of Change in Your Organization” presentation, Beck asked the audience, “What are the most important problems in your field?” (and “Are you working on them? / Why not?”).

I asked Beck how she’d answer that herself. She noted, “Here are a couple problems that come to bed with me every night”:

One is how we manage ideas. From an institutional perspective, sharing an idea is a risk and needs to be rewarded. How do we reward the sharing of an idea without having to commit resources to making every idea happen? How do we document an idea so that it’s findable and translatable in a day/week/month/year? How does that documentation complement any given person’s ideation style (I draw my ideas, you write yours, she likes to talk things out)? How do we ensure that people feel productive and valuable when their job is to produce something as intangible as an idea?

Another is using science as a way of knowing about the world. We have been taught to view science as a pure, cold, controlled pursuit. What happens when you empower warm-bodied individuals, living complex lives with it? Where does intuition complement and complicate a scientific understanding of the world? How do I know who to trust when scientific claims can be completely contradictory? How do I isolate and measure something in my everyday life when it is influenced by countless other variables?

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Keeping Up with Trends: Reading & Experimenting

I asked Beck what she reads or follows to keep up with the latest trends. She said:

I’m paying a lot of attention to the Quantified Self movement and conducting a few personal experiments in that realm.

I’ve been a loyal follower of Merlin Mann since 2006 and continue to pick up everything he puts down. [ see 43 Folders and Kung Fu Grippe ]

Dave Gray opened a whole new world of visual thinking and creativity for me and continues to inspire. [ see Communication Nation ]

I also read paper: a couple of books every month, the Sunday NYT, (mostly museum) journal articles.

I asked what she saw as some of the major trends in the next 5-10 years. Beck responded:

As for trends, I’m looking forward to seeing what form factor personal computing takes and which forms of input and projection will seem rudimentary (mice? keyboards? glass screens?) in a decade’s time.

I also feel we are in a “Roaring Twenties” period with privacy and am curious to see how the public lives of private individuals morph over the next several years.

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Personal Branding: Sharing from the Stage

Between her blog, presentations and speaking engagements, illustrations, and weekly “office hours” salon in Durham, I’ve noticed that Beck has built a strong personal brand as a thought leader in several domains. I asked her advice about personal branding. She shared four points:

• Be kind to others and to yourself.
• Realize that you are on a stage with a microphone, speak accordingly.
• Share only that which you would share both at work and at home.
• If it gives you pause, pause.

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Tools: Sharing, Organizing & Communicating Ideas

I asked Beck what tools she uses to share, organize, and communicate her ideas. She elaborated:

My brain isn’t just in my skull, anymore. It’s in the sketchbook and iPhone that I have with me nearly everywhere I go. I sync Notational Velocity (which is what I’m using to write this, by way of QuickCursor and WriteRoom) to TaskPaper via SimpleText so that all of my writing is accessible via my iPhone. I also scan in my sketchbooks and import them into Evernote so that they’re on my iPhone as well (but that system doesn’t work as well as I’d like it to).

I couldn’t work without Gmail (as opposed to Entourage or Thunderbird or Mail) and I couldn’t Gmail without a slew of filters, Mailplane and Multiple Inboxes.

Flickr by way of Twitter and Facebook is my sharing platform of choice. I’ve been using Flickr nearly every day since 2004 and am surprised by the amount of loyalty I have to it.

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Career Advice: Technology, Design, and UX

I asked Beck’s advice for people starting out in technology, design, user experience (UX), or related fields. She recommended three things:

1. Tell your own, authentic story… and start right now. Reading an honest account of an enthusiastic pursuit to learn something is compelling and inspiring.
2. Create for stock and for flow. Figure out how much time you can invest and divide your efforts amongst smaller, less edited but more frequent creations (flow) and more thoughtful, higher fidelity ones (stock). I feed my flow with sketches, tweets and photo uploads. I feed my stock with more thoughtful pieces and art projects that take more planning and editing.
3. Fake it until you make it. Figure out who you want to be and act as that person would act. Publish for their followers, create with the confidence they’ve established. I’ve made tremendous change happen in my life and much of it started by playing pretend.

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Conclusion

Thanks for sharing your experience and insights, Beck! This is the 12th in my series of interviews with marketing experts and business leaders, in North Carolina and beyond. If there’s someone you’d like to learn from, let me know and I’ll try to feature them in a future interview.

Photo courtesy of Beck Tench

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Tagged as: career advice, experience, getting ahead, interview, personal branding, research triangle, trends, web design