My Design Journey Isn’t Unique
I don’t kid myself to think that I am a special little snowflake. Crazy, I know. This is actually a great thing because a lot of peace comes with anonymity. I often feel ambivalent about attention anyway. Sometimes I love attention, like during my bikini fitness competitor days, and sometimes I hate it, like in the way that I prefer to slip into the background and design-make instead of act as the face of a company. In fact, I prefer to serve as a vessel through which important information passes.
How I ended up at CMCI in the STCM program is directly related to what I wrote in the previous sentence. I want to design for people other than myself. I want to intimately understand the needs of users, more specifically marginalized users, and design for them. I feel like design serves as a beautiful stepping stool for what society should be shaping to assist and to uplift people often left out. The actual journey to STCM went a little something like this for me:
My question is: “how can more designs be created to accommodate all users?” or “how can design help us create a more equitable world?”. I suppose my personal story does play a factor here as the daughter of two Latin American immigrants who are both Native Spanish speakers, and studying International Relations undergrad, and being apart of NGOs and non-profits (blah, blah, blah).
I am strong in Adobe Suite tools, and have come from an art and cartooning background. I know my way around a sewing machine, and have even made some clothes. I am looking forward to learning more about coding as I have only dabbled in some Java tutorials. The CEO of a startup I worked for back in 2017 said he thought I would be great at coding. (Here I am, Elery, learning how to code and liking it, so thanks.) It’s tough to pin down exactly what I would design if I could design anything, but they will all share the same goal: inclusivity and ease of living for folks. If the products I create could reduce some unnecessary suffering for any person or group of people, I would be thrilled.
Part II:
Three things I absolutely adore (because if you don’t love it, why do it?). The weight room of a gym, Spotify, and public transit.
The weight room is where I have physically reached my breaking point time and again only to return the next day. Every time you train a muscle group, you make a bunch of little tears in your muscles, and the pain and soreness are the necessary evils to building muscle. Beautiful. I imagine the people behind weight rooms were strength competitors or professional athletes. Weight rooms exist for people to strength-build, physique-build, practice stability, practice balance, or to become better athletes overall. I find weight rooms intriguing because of the crowd and activity. It’s always a mix of people with different goals, maybe some jabronis, maybe some athletes, maybe some beginners, and it can be a strangely social place. It’s also a great place to clear your mind as you find yourself unable to think about much else when you have 200lbs of iron on your back.
Spotify. Is that cliche? I have used Spotify premium for about 8 years, and it has changed the way I listen to music. Through a cursory Google search, I have discovered that Spotify was created by Daniel Ek of Stockholm, Sweden. According to the BBC, Spotify was created, “as a response to the growing piracy problem the music industry was facing.” Spotify exists to combat piracy, but also (in my mind) to expose people all over to new music. I have a soundtrack for every single activity in my life, and life is so much cooler with a soundtrack.
I love public transit. Public transit exists as a means to move large amounts of people from one destination to the next. Blaise Pascal launched the first-ever public bus line with the intention of holding more people than horse-drawn carriages. From the RTD buses in Denver to the T in Boston to the Subway in NYC, the ease of jumping on and hanging out until you reach your stop is unmatched. Plus, the people watching can’t be beat.
Three things I don’t like: Facebook, cooking, and flights. I don’t exactly hate these things, but I’m certainly far from liking them.
Facebook, when will it end? The story of Facebook is so popular that it turned into a major motion picture. Facebook started out as some Harvard face-rating platform (FaceMash), and transformed into a way to connect friends online. Fine. Mark Zuckerberg, a rotating feature in Congress these days, made Facebook in order to connect Harvard students with one another. Facebook now exists to annoy people with constant, useless notifications. Even worse, the features they build out are increasingly annoying and useless. I feel as though Facebook has gone from an innocent “connect with those you love no matter where you are” to spying, data collecting, and constant annoyance. Facebook’s one redeeming quality is that it reminds me of my friends’ birthdays.
Cooking food is no relaxing, fun experience for me. The story of cooking probably dates back to the discovery of fire. Cooking food was probably utilitarian, until people actually wanted some interesting flavors in their mouths. Cooking also cooks out germs and helps us evade the dangers of raw food. I think cooking is tedious and repetitive, and I wish that I could just microwave everything. I cook everything I eat, and I eat around five times a day. For me, cooking is a means to an end.
I like to travel, and I have been to many places via plane, but staring down the barrel of a long flight is a personal nightmare. In 1903 Wilbur and Orville Wright made four brief flights at Kitty Hawk with their first powered aircraft, which began the journey of what is now the modern plane experience. They were invented for recreation, transportation of goods and people, military, and research. The modern day flight experience branches off from around the 50s when flights were sort of a luxurious, high class experience. Nowadays if you’re in economy or coach, and your knees are in your chest, it’s not exactly the picture of luxury. The stale air, lack of space, claustrophobia-inducing experience is not the one for me.
