The 12 Problems and Making Streets Safer
Remember your why
Hi Friends,
I’ve been organizing my writing all wrong.
I started writing online 9 months ago and started to build my personal website step by step, profiling my writing and some great projects and companies I’ve worked on over the years.
It was a fairly standard squarespace blog, and I would tag things based on content.
Healthcare.
Entrepreneurship.
Digital Community.
But this week I wrote something that reminded me of my 12 Favorite Problems.
This framework is familiar to those who have gone through Write of Passage. If we use it wisely, the 12 problems are an effective filter for how we spend our attention. What we read, watch, and talk about. The antennas that we put out.
This foundational exercise for writing online is based on the idea that “output” (your essays) come from an abundance of thinking acquired through reading, conversations, podcasts, panels, etc. (“inputs”)
The problem with tagging my writing with themes is that I started to lose the underlying “why” behind what I was writing. And that is where the 12 Problems come in.
I spent the weekend reorganizing my essays based on the problem each one is related to. Sometimes, an essay provided a piece of the puzzle and sometimes just musings. It’s not on my website yet—but you can check it out on my notion.
These problems deserve a review at least every six months. This week I’m sharing my updated problem set.
My 12 Favorite Problems
Your 12 Favorite Problems live on the intellectual back-burner: you are scavenging the world looking for ideas that fit the things you wonder most about.
Innovation Spotlight
Longtime readers likely know that I have a bit of an obsession about the intersection of urban design and healthcare.
In fact, at least two of my favorite problems relate to our health and our surroundings:
How can we promote better health through the design of neighborhoods and cities?
How does the beauty of our surroundings impact our lives? How do we advocate for beauty when there are so many other pressing problems in this world?
Ally is a business that I have been following for some time that is working at the intersection of smart cities, health, and gender. They are a B2B app that is turning local stores into safe spaces by providing training for shopkeepers/ workers, referrals to help and incident reporting and data analytics.
The initial training is focused on domestic abuse + street harassment. Shop owners and workers are trained in how to respond to events that they see, and to safe words customers use to ask for help. Sometimes, a person in an abusive relationship just needs a safe place to make a call and to sit and wait to for help. Look out for the Ally sticker (bottom left corner) in shops and gyms around London and coming soon, around Bangkok!
I’d love to hear your favorite problems, and thoughts on making public spaces safer for people. Let me know in the comments below :)
— Melissa