H: What did you expect M to be like?

N: You typically have to apply to participate in Project M, and one of the requirements for the application is to explain why you’re interested—you’re asked to be “clear and honest.”

I took this as an opportunity to write out for myself why I wanted to go, and came to a realization that I’m better at thinking than I am at making, but I enjoy making more than thinking. When I started at CCA straight out of high school, it was all about making for me. But after four years, it became more about thinking, and I found that conceptualizing had taken up the majority of my time. Christopher Simmons, one of my teachers, told me that as I was , I was constantly obsessed with what’s right, and that compulsion hindered my design process.

I was at a point in my growth as a designer where I was ready to integrate judgement and curation, a desire to the see the right thing, with intuition and instinct, that which may seem wrong.

M for me was to be a platform to rapidly make within the facilitation of a very specific and intense context. The idea of working and focusing on a project while being committed to collaboration was an idea that I found deeply challenging yet also attractive.

This was a chance for me to be unafraid to make mistakes and to engage directly with my passions, and an opportunity for me to discover things through the process of making.

And frankly, I just wanted to and still want to help people with design, one of the few talents that I’ve been blessed with, and get better at doing it.

I’m pretty fortuitous in that by going to CCA and working as a designer in San Francisco, I’ve been able to meet, speak, and even be taught by a lot of people who have done and been involved with M in the past. I gathered a wide variety of perspectives from them, ranging from the skeptical to the sanguine, and from those I was able to form other expectations besides those which I just addressed:

• I expected to be humbled.
• I expected to be open-minded.
• I expected to meet incredibly amazing people.

H: How was it different than you thought it would be?

N: To be honest, we didn’t make as much as I thought we would.

We’re in a position right now where we’re sprinting to wrap up an idea that we started during our first week, and another idea that we started during our second week. I think part of the reason why this happened is we found it difficult to commit to our ideas and see them through.

But on the flip side of that, if we had gone and just worked the entire two weeks, the experience would have been wasted. Part of what made M so memorable and valuable was spending time with people and simply being where we were.

Designing takes time, and good things take time. And because I believe that to design good things is for others, I realized that it takes time to build relationships with people and to really understand not necessarily just what they desire or just what they require, but something that’s a combination of both.

The South was also unlike anything that I had ever experienced before in my entire life. I’ve travelled across the country, but I’ve literally only travelled across it via airplane from coast to coast, besides a few trips into states adjacent to California. I found it really amusing that the only other Asians within miles were students with another organization in town called Project Horseshoe Farm and the family who runs a Chinese restaurant called China Garden.

In a sense, I came in with a lot of idealism and it was quickly put to the test by reality. The world simultaneously felt smaller yet bigger at the same time.

H: What was your favorite and least favorite part?

N: This is completely unrelated to our projects, but my favorite part was during the weekend in-between our two weeks in Greensboro, when a bunch of us, including Project M-alumni who came into town for a few days, swam in a lake (cheerily nicknamed Blood Lake) in the middle of the night underneath the Supermoon. The water was pitch black yet everything was incredibly visible because of the moon. Also, the water was really, really warm.

My least favorite part was constantly getting eaten alive by mosquitoes.

H: Would you recommend it to friends, why/why not?

N: Yes and no. I’d especially recommend it to my friends who have grown up in cities their entire lives, and even more especially recommend it to my friends who are working in the Bay Area right now. But you have to go into it with an open-mind, and you have to go in ready to ask a lot of questions about everything.

With all that being said though, if the opportunity arises for you to ever travel to Greensboro, you should just go.

H: Favorite place to eat?

Is that a trick question?

H: Anything you learned about yourself while in Alabama?

There were a bunch of things that I learned about myself:

• I am blessed beyond what I can comprehend.
• I can think while making, but it’s harder for me to make while thinking.
• I can write a pretty sweet rap.

But besides what I learned about myself, there were a lot of things that I just learned in general.

One of my teachers, Bob Aufuldish, told us in class once that comparing is dangerous—you have to know what you want. On several different occasions, I learned that it’s not about your clothes or your appearance. It’s not about your age. It isn’t even about what you’ve done. It’s about that thing that’s under your chest when you beat the left side of it. Heart. Character. Soul.

During one of our last nights in Greensboro, we saw the strangest thing as we walked outside to take a break from working in front of our computers. Far off in the distance and in the east was a lightning storm on a scale that I had never before witnessed. It was both powerful and sublime as flashes of light ripped out and explosions burst across the sky. Yet the part that I couldn’t understand while watching was that there was no thunder—there was no sound.

We had been playing with fireworks throughout our time there, and the result of an effective firework now seems like a grain of sand in comparison to Grand Canyon when matched against the strength of that storm. The storm said nothing yet what it exhibited was louder than any sound fathomable.

As I approached the end of my time in Alabama, I began to realize more than ever before the strength in showing and not telling. Ideas are essential, yet if they aren’t executed their essence is wasted. I felt a desire to make that’s stronger than ever before, almost out of necessity.

Debbie Millman ends her Design Matters podcasts really poetically: “We can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both.”

As I move forward, something for me to think about is that lightning always precedes thunder.

H: Any other comments/things you can think of?

We got a chance to visit the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham, and this quote really resonated with me:

“No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they’d die for.” — Martin Luther King Jr.