How to Find Gigs in Aerospace by Helping Your Community
Harnessing Fun and Science to Protect Our Waterways
Recently I tried to sign up for a freelance website where I can take on design gigs. I thought this would be a good use of time given I am more than halfway through a UI design certificate course as I’m trying to grow from just a user experience designer to someone who can also make user interface assets in Figma.
As someone who has never had trouble finding a great job as a senior UX designer, I was surprised when I didn’t hear back from the organization, I’d applied to do this work in. Now, there may be more than meets the eye as to why I haven’t had success but there is plenty to see so far why I have not by looking at some of their recommendations:
In today’s digital world, it is so easy to sign up for a service with our email account and may mistake a semblance of fluency in our ease of use with digital products versus the truly hard work it takes to make them. And judging from some press releases regarding the type of work Fiverr takes on, it is really motivating to improve myself.
In order to do that, I need a process. In order to think out loud about my process, I’m sharing my steps thus far here as a trail to comeback to in case I get distracted and so that its easy to jump in. If you see something that works, remix it!
First, if you follow my writing, you know that I am a Senior UX Designer that is studying Nuclear and Mechanical Engineering. My mission is to get humans on Mars. How do I keep track of this? By treating it like a design project.
I keep my north star written down in a Roadmap tool from a company called ProdPad.
You can see here I am tracking my vision, strategy, description, and value as I learn how to use their tool. It is a constant reminder. To get a free trial, check this out:
So, now I know what types of projects I want to take on for a online gig company like Fiverr and which I will not accept. It must be a project directly contributing to a community enabling itself to get to Mars. Now I’d been using excel to track progress towards goals but recently shifted over to Airtable because I like the intuitiveness of that platform and that I can start a prototype database pretty quickly should I need to.
In this tool I have a view that captures 5 major areas I need to be investing in order to reach the level of creativity where people from around the world are wanting to pay me to do community-based mars missions related work.
How did I decide on these 5 areas? I used ChatGPT to talk through some important aspects and prioritize them. I’ll give you an example:
In this ChatGPT conversation, I’ve asked ChatGPT to explore how the need for a sanitation system on Mars could inspire a pilot approach to address our water quality in Richmond. Let’s complicate it a little more. We want to clean up the water using the system that people go through when purchasing, transporting, and using fireworks near the James River:
Here is the table of results I got back:
Now the goal is to combine relevant elements from both the water quality improvement table and the fireworks table.
Ok, so of all of those, a community event with water rockets seems like the most straight forward. If we can get people to make their own water rocket using household supplies, we may be able to get them to save money on a family activity that builds friendship and participation in the community. There could be a local presence of eco-friendly businesses that support harnessing of rain water. By bringing in a crowd to actively recycle, they would have an audience to sell to: People who want to harvest their own rainwater. This type of thinking satisfies one of my five major areas in the table: Social Engagement.
It looks like NASA has already put together some curriculum:
Ok, so how would we put on an event? Well there is a NASA Grant for that:
By copy pasting the text from the NASA grant into our existing thread, we get this table:
Now we can takes NASA’s water bottle rocket project and ask how it can be used in this schema:
More on NASAs rocket education can be found here:
So now I actually have a NASA grant concept that I am going to take to my graduate program and write a grant for if they deem it is within my purview as a graduate student. But before I do this, I will approach the city of Richmond for feedback on the idea. No matter what, I want to make this event happen, even if its just as my apartment or local part of Richmond because it is an act of social engagement. But I can’t do it on my own so I will create an EventBrite / meetup to whiteboard the concept. Of course the effort will require one of the skills on Fiverr!
Looking back at what they are hiring for, I see the following in design:
Then there is the topic of video and animation.
I’ve made user journeys, which take a similiar thought process to story boards but its probably a little different. So I’ve got some skills to learn there. And I’ve made music videos on Instagram with some pretty cool art I source form others. Though, again, I likely have some stuff to learn.
So even though I am a Senior UX Designer and do very well in the job market, taking some time here to learn new skills in the emerging gig economy positions me well to bring value to a full time employer, a gig employer, or my own business.
It would be easier to sit here and tell you with static graphs about why you and I are entitled to more work at a higher pay. But we aren’t. We live in an increasingly global economy with more competition from people who are truly creative and hard working. But it isn’t a zero-sum game of survival. It just takes a fresh perspective. I’ve made some of the AI art for this article. If you need help thinking of new ways to go beyond self imposed limitations and creatively think about how to help your community, feel free to reach out! Or if you just want to get inpsired to compete with the billionares in Space Tech, read this:
