Airing it out: Ten years being a designer
I’ve put together a small series of vignettes presented as performative text
Dear Black, Indigenous, Person of Color and Queer and Trans Person of Color,
I’m using the process of writing and typing this up as an open, transparent place to share things with people who aren’t me. Doing this has helped me stitch together the things that stand out in my design journey. I close out this section by reflecting on what the thread is that ties these few experiences together. As I put together my Expression of Interest for Wonderlab, the Ph.D. program, and started reading and writing for my research I’ve felt like I need to be explicit and lay out what experiences got me to where I am professionally.
It might be that I need to write it out in order to let go of it and move on from having my past experiences define who I am and what I do now.
1999, Dunwoody, Georgia
In my elementary school, I played with toys I made myself for fun. I hand-sewed a panda doll for a younger girl who came over while my mom gave her parents Japanese language classes in our kitchen. I made a busy criss-cross of tracks for my marbles out of bristol paper and glue. I used to spend hours making it and playing with my family friend Eugene (Yoo-Jin). I drew outfits with colored pencil that I thought were cool. My mom framed the drawings. I did a lot of making and felt extremely comfortable doing it.
I grew up speaking one language and living one strong culture at home, another at school, and another at my other parent’s house. I was finding refuge in not using language so much and thinking through making instead.
2007, Roswell High School
I took an interior design class as an elective and didn’t feel like I got what I wanted from it, so I asked another teacher of mine to be an independent study teacher of interior design. I built out the course outline using a book I owned called, “Feng Shui Your Life” by Jamie Barrett. The book was full of diagrams and structure for me to learn about ways to place stuff in the home. Before that I went with my intuition when it came to totally reorienting the future in my room or my mom’s living room furniture every few months. My mom, responding to what I was doing said, “You don’t actually believe in that stuff do you?”
2008, Randall-Paulson Architects on the mill
At an architecture and interior design firm with about forty employees, I was responsible for re-doing and keeping organized the resource library. I started working there as an intern at sixteen, was there for more than two years, and left when I graduated high school. It was the perfect job because I loved organizing and was really good at it. It was along a river, surrounded by trees in a beautiful building. The whole place was pretty intimidating though because I don’t do well with formal hierarchy. I felt I required to be someone else–an upper middle class, white, suburban intern girl. At the same time I was totally not sure how to pretend to be that someone in the first place.
The owner of the firm had just built a house nearby. By total coincidence, he tore down my friend Dallas’ childhood home to build it. Her house was a cool big mod shed from the seventies popular in the United States. I loved that place. I barely brought up the courage or sense of humor to tell the owner.
One day, let’s call her Helen, an interior designer, pulled a tray of color swatches from the resource library. I watched her work to learn. She put a carpet square on the table that the client from the United States Postal Service picked out. What she did next surprised me. She went on to match paint swatches one by one to the tiny loops in the corporate carpet tile sample. Until then, I imagined that designing interior spaces and therefore the field of interior design to be more creative than this.
The owners’ niece came to work a year into my time at the firm. She was a year older. I was a junior in high school then, and she was a senior. Through casual conversation, I learned she and the other interns earned two dollars more an hour than I did. I failed to bring it up to my supervisor or to the owner. And neither did the other me who I tried to pretend to be.
2011, Syracuse University, New York State
I used the disappointing moment of seeing Heather pick paint samples as fuel to not end up doing that as a job. In interior design school, my thesis was about the collective memory of a historically politically engaged neighborhood, Westcott, in Syracuse, New York. I designed sidewalk installations and storytelling spaces on-site where the original stories about events thirty years back took place. I wrote and floor-planned my thesis about “form translating to emotion, transforming into memories. For this thesis, the goal is to allow for the complexity of interior space to hold the same evocative functions as any other memory-keeping device.” As I worked on the project, a professor told me that my project “needs to be within four walls. It’s an interior design thesis.” I thought, ‘Right, literally.’
2013, The New School, New York City
“Have you ever tried working in structure?” is a question a colleague asked me as we worked on a project together in graduate design school. I really struggled in that collaboration because I felt I needed to be someone else again. I just didn’t happen to work in their structure that they happened to lead the group with. This simple question was a catalyst for firstly, total self-doubt, and later self-definition and a strong thesis question and project. My thesis asked “How might the process for design be used to bridge the gap between the material world and the inner world?” The project itself was in collaboration with a child and family therapy clinic in New York City. I designed objects for clinicians and parents to use to remind them to use their therapy skills more often. I also made a new design process for externalizing emotions and states of mind.
2014, Inwood, New York City
After finishing six years straight of design education, part of my life was in an identity crisis. It’s important to have people around you who mirror a similar life experience, culture, and values. It’s how children form their sense of self that they carry with them into adulthood. I had made tons of friends, but in my design life had just one or no people around me at any time who I felt strongly mirrored me. I was obsessed with watching documentaries and finding artwork about people who are half African diaspora, half Asian diaspora like me. I also dug up documentaries about children of cross-racial adoption. I was looking for some piece of information or proof that having people like you around you was a real and important thing. But I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for then.
2016, New York City Courthouse
For fifteen days I served jury duty where myself and eleven other jurors listened to a ‘criminal’ case being presented and deliberated on the verdict in a small room. Among many things, this experience really showed me and tested my ability to name what I stand for, speak on it, and defend it all in real time.
This period was about a year into my on and off work volunteering for social justice organizations related to the prison system and immigrant rights.
2017, Matter–Mind Studio, New York City
With two colleagues from graduate school, we started a research, strategy, and design studio starting by working with after school programs, a tech startup, and a public health organization among others. Over the two plus years working on the studio, I kept finding my personal values, the way I’ve politicized my ideas about things is barely being reflected in our work, collectively.
My skills in making and playing as a child turned into an interest in interior design. Later, I learned how conservative design is but thanks to the negativity and examples that let me to see what I do care about, I carved out my practice in graduate school and into my experience teaching and setting up my studio. So few vignettes like these leave out ninety nine percent of anyone’s life; childhood, family, friends, travel, work experiences, vulnerabilities, perseverance.
As I reflect while I write this, I feel if I told my full story, the connection to my Ph.D. work would be stronger. But, I’ll choose to let those connections and understanding come through in my new research work.
