This is Mona

I just discovered this new iPhone app, GateGuru. It provides listings and user-generated reviews of places to eat at 85 US airports, with plans to expand worldwide.

http://gateguruapp.com/

Does the word roller-coaster mean anything to you? The kind that drives you to the highest peaks and just plummets before you can even blink. Yep, that kind. I’ve been on it, and it lasted about a year. Around March of last year I decided to take my life into a bit of a pivot. Actually, I lie, it was a huge pivot. I made a non- career related move that would result, unbeknownst to me, in a nomadic trip (pun intended).

I decided that after almost 9 years of living on my own, quite far from my roots (i.e. my parents), I would go back and re-connect. Although I should say that the thought of spending 9 years abroad only to dive into the Middle East would be a bit of a clusterfuck. No, I decided that the best way to go home was to ease my way into it, which means I decided to move to London.

The London schtick lasted 6 months. Lebanon came right after for another 6 months. It took me all but 4 months in Lebanon to realize that Toronto is where I really want and needed to be. Hanging out with my parents for 6 months was fantastic and I ingested as much of the familial life as I could get. As well, I was deeply involved in the advertising space in Lebanon. While I was very happy to be pioneering digital marketing, I found myself knee deep in a practice without the thinking. So in a sequence we like to use at Normative of Learn, Think, Make; I was only Making, in Lebanon. This was/is not a space I want to play in. I’m much more interested in the thinking aspect of projects. I like thinking about how design can improve things. Things like how users interact on a website, organizational structure, communications structure, relationships, branding, running shoes, physical space. With all this said, I realized the following: sometimes you need to complete the full circle before realizing that the starting point was where you really belong. This rang true for me. I decided to move back to Toronto.

The stars at that point kept aligning, especially when it came to my career. My joining Normative came after a sequence of positively bizarre coincidences, but also a very nice marriage of opportunity, circumstance and just pure fate.

Its a happy marriage. And if you know the dynamics of my bosses, you’ll know that my use of the word marriage is bang on ;)

So there you have it. What i’ve been up to and what, in part, contributed to my short hiatus from this blog. If you enjoy the topics and areas of interest I highlighted above related to design thinking, stay tuned as I will be writing lots about that on this blog and on our Normative blog (which is coming!).