So lately, when physical things press their surfaces onto my life, I’ve begun to experience that presence as pressure—insistent, persistent, excessively so.

I have nothing against owning physical things; it is a well-known fact that you cannot snuggle in, embrace, or caress bits and bytes of information. But it is also a unique requirement of city living (and perhaps simple, direct living) that you don’t gather too much of it all at once.

That’s why today I decided, on a whim, to clear my apartment of extraneous things. Things that have outgrown their usefulness, and sit on shelves gathering dust and wishful thinking.

I went about this haphazardly, energetically. (Maybe it was the spring breeze.) In several plastic bags went bowls, bags, shoes, ties, mugs, picture frames, jewelry… and before I could think too hard about it, I was clanking out the door. I came back an hour later with a receipt from Housing Works.

Later in the day, while riding the subway, a clear image of one of the items I had given away surfaced. I pushed it away, determined to get on with life. It resurfaced. (See what I mean about persistence?) I gave in and turned the item over in my mind.

The object was a mug, plain and white, cylindrical, with a sparse pattern of black dots near the rim. Inside the mug is a hand-painted ceramic dog. I could picture in my mind every crack on that dog, etched deep brown from countless hot chocolates and strong black teas.

The mug was given to me by Yang, my significant other of nearly 10 years. It was one of the first gifts he had ever given me, and I thought it was one of the most wonderful things I’d ever seen. I mean, it had a tiny dog in the bottom! Adding to my delight upon receiving it was the fact that he had found it himself. Like, he actually had go someplace trendy like Newbury Street (Boston, baby!), and shop. For me.

Let’s be honest here, this is someone for whom buying 3 oranges at the supermarket is a challenge, so I was pretty impressed. (I love you!)

Needless to say, this mug was significant to me. And the more I thought about it, the more I regretted giving it away.

Even though the mug hadn’t touched a drop of tea in over 2 years, I wanted it back. I wanted it back because it was a talisman, a gateway to that same feeling of delight I felt when receiving it, and to all those evenings in college spent cradling it through late-night conversations and study sessions. The fact that it wasn’t being used anymore didn’t matter. This wasn’t a mug, this was a sepia-toned photograph.

And this is why people have basements and closets, attics and garages. Our emotional attachment to objects is a force of nature.

Instead of berating myself for regretting, for clinging, for living too much in the past and all those things we’re not supposed to do in a life well-lived, I’d like to propose a toast:

Here’s to objects

…for their evocative potency, for their unique ability to enable was well as encapsulate the events of life, as both catalyst and container.

Here’s to physicality

…always a meaningful part of our existence (At least, until the singularity claims us) and the thoughtful struggles it inspires in us as we gasp for space.

And here’s to memory

…to information stored in a medium far more fragile than ceramic, glass, stone, fabric, or wood, yet able to persist despite fires and hurricanes, war and migration, obsolescence and small apartments.

Cheers.

• Designers ain’t got nothing on engineers when it comes to “agile.”
• People can always tell when you are trying to impress them.
• You can practice foaming milk for lattes with water and a little bit of dish soap.

But the most important thing I have learned, and am still learning, has to do with the difference between knowledge and experience.

Turns out, four months out, I’m still reeling from The SVA IxD Experience (that should be the name of a rock opera). All those team projects. All that thesis angst. All that worrying about the future compacted into two frenzied years. And all that freakin’ knowledge.

School gives you knowledge, that much is obvious. But if your school is SVA, it also tries to give you Real World Experience. All those design briefs and presentation skills and late-night hyper-managerial strategizing sessions (a.k.a. whining about how much work we have to do). Not to mention the endless stream of Tweetable design adages. It was all so convincingly experiential that I mistook it for actual experience.

Knowledge, turns out, is not the same thing as experience.

Knowledge is always filtered through the lens of whoever imparts it. No matter how rigorous the curriculum or careful the learner, the parts that don’t fit into a cohesive narrative tend to get conveniently left out. And that means knowledge rarely ends up being as subtle and nuanced as it should be. It paints with broad, bold strokes that are easy to commit to memory. And in the end, you’re looking at things through a telescope. Even if the focus is clear and sharp, you’re still thousands of miles away.

And then, when you actually do land on the moon, you realize it is nothing like what you’d imagined.

Take all the musings I had done for my thesis, for example. After all those books, lectures, workshops, symposia, and debates with teachers and classmates, I thought I had the product development process all figured out. It was simply a matter of having a steady vision, tempering that with empathy for your audience, and then releasing fast and early. Armed thusly to the teeth with wise sayings and useful rules-of-thumb, I launched into my new career as interaction designer at (probably) the world’s most meritocratic, engineering-driven software firm ever. And it was here that I learned that everything I know has an asterisk after it.

Having vision is important, but so is co-owning it with your team. Empathy as a word is nice but it can collide with business objectives and technical realities. And there are a thousand variations on “fast and early.” A company that runs on engineers can take that to an extreme, which has its own faults and merits. And even if you feel like things are going off kilter, they are actually right on track (or vice versa).

Day by day, week by week, I’m slowly getting used to life on the moon. I’m filling in the gaps of understanding with detailed first-hand sketches. Being a direct observer is a lot tougher than reading a book where everything make sense. There are plenty of contradictions and equally good options you can’t choose between. Sometimes there is a sore lack of reason. “Why do we do things this way?” “Because it’s how we’ve always done it, but also because we haven’t had the time, but also because of the nature of the product…” The right answer isn’t simple, and there are a million of them anyway.

Experience.

Of course, school was an experience, too. But it’s an experience of school, not of your actual career. Any university brochure that tells you otherwise is lying to you. It can do things to prepare you for things to come by filling your head with rough outlines. But then it’s up to you to fill in all the gory details, the vibrant hues, and the subtle shading.

Then, as soon as the ink dries, that experience ossifies into knowledge, and you start afresh with new experiences. Observe, zoom in, clarify, deepen. Like a gorgeously infinite fractal, the process never ends. There is no limit to the fidelity of experience.

Better make sure your inkpot is full.

The adult in me came up with that just now—”raspberry ice cupcake”—partly because it sounds kind of awesome, but mostly to distinguish it from what it should have been (a raspberry ice pop) but was not. I had run out of room in my hyperspecialized 7-minute ice pop-making device, so the leftover syrup went into a silicon cupcake mold instead. Then it sat, uncovered, in my freezer for days before I remembered it was there and decided, experimentally, to eat it.

Seven-year-old me would have just called it an ice pop, unconventional shape be damned. She would have eaten not with the probing palate of a critic, but with a sense of sheer delight at the miracle of refrigeration. She would have forgiven the rough graininess of the ice particles, the result of a freezing process much longer than 7 minutes. She would even have ignored the fact that the flavor was ever so slightly colored by that mysterious and unseemly freezer taste. That is, if she even knew what a freezer taste was.

To a 7-year-old, an ice pop was an ice pop was an ice pop if it were cold, juicy, and great at staining cheeks and shirt fronts. None of this stuff about the crystalline structure of ice being different depending on how you froze it. Or the shape needing to resemble an iPod with a stick going through it. Or the taste needing to be totally pure and free from invasive freezer esters. By my current standards, anything violating these principles of ice pop perfection resulted in disappointment. Twenty years ago I would have thought it was the greatest thing ever.

As you get older, life cannot help but get more dissatisfying. You get this thing called culture (or knowledge, I forget which it is) ingrained in you, and it makes you more particular. It makes decisions harder. You start to crave that rarefied level of fine-grained control, which isn’t always easier to achieve.

Maybe this is why we adults lust after simplicity the way we do. We have magazines named after it, objects praised because they exhibit it, people paid to come into our lives and provide it. We say we want simplicity, but really, I think we just want to be kids again.

Kids don’t care about sorting laundry. When I was little I remember doing my own laundry every week. Everything went in at once, on the one setting I knew how to operate. Nonetheless, everything came out satisfactorily wearable no matter what I did or did not do.

Kids also don’t care about the color of people’s skin or what neighborhood they are from. I grew up in a very average Kentucky suburb and my two best friends in elementary school were African-American and Latino, both from less desirable neighborhoods. To me they were just other kids I went to school with, as valid a candidate for Best Friendship as any. Though as time went on, I discovered that they were culturally and socio-economically Others. I haven’t heard from them in the last 19 years.

Life as a kid is marked by a lack of distinctions, choices, and gradients. Of course, sometimes having those things are good; they help us tell apart the edible mushroom from the poisonous ones. They help us navigate a world shrouded in shades of gray. But in the case of laundry and friends (I’m slowly discovering that pretty much everything in life can be turned into an allegory involving laundry or friends), we could perhaps be a little less antsy about it all.

How many things in life would actually be tons better if we cared a little less? How much more joy would we get out of each bite of ice pop? Each subway ride with strangers so different from us? Each freshly laundered sheet tinted a delicate pink by an errant red shirt?

I want to experience being seven again, but of course I can’t. Besides, I don’t want to actually be seven again—that would be terrifying, in another way. The best I can do, is to remind myself, when things seem to get too dissatisfying again, to step back and pretend that I don’t know enough yet to be really bothered by it.

And now that it’s finally happening, I don’t know what to write. So, maybe I’ll start with a list. A list of things I’ve done since grad school ended on May 10, 2012. Here goes:

1. cleaned the apartment
2. traveled to China
3. bought my grandparents an iPad
4. escaped the city with a Zipcar
5. reconnected with friends
6. said goodbye to friends
7. started a new job
8. started apartment hunting
9. started writing morning pages
10. made felt foxes
11. cooked dinner
12. discovered new restaurants
13. walked all over Manhattan
14. watched every documentary on dogs and chickens on Netflix
15. bought new clothing
16. picnicked in Central Park
17. swingdanced
18. read

Whew.

It’s funny, reading back over this list, I can’t help but feel a real sense of pride and accomplishment. More so than I had felt when walking off stage after presenting my thesis to an audience of 200.

That’s a bit odd, isn’t it? Shouldn’t I have been thrilled to finally complete my Master’s Degree, and in front of so many people to boot? But in truth, what I felt was mostly relief. Not so much a sense of achievement, as just a big, deep, foundational exhalation of stale worries. And I remember thinking: Now that I’m free, I can finally face a real challenge for a change.

Don’t get me wrong, grad school was a challenge. It was spectacularly hard, both professionally and personally. Through it all, I learned a lot of visceral lessons about what it means to be a good designer, teammate, friend and human being. But up until the very end, grad school was still fourteen people, in an intimate studio, hunkered over our daily studently concerns.

Our challenges were great, but they were limited in scope. We could fall, but we couldn’t really fall that hard. We had the support of our peers, of our professionally exalted teachers, amd of the indomitable Liz Danzico herself. And strangely, in that environment, I felt myself becoming a little complacent. Despite all the high expectations and lofty goals, I was coasting. Through all the desktop battles and reverberating waves of stress, I developed an inertia of sorts: I just had to work all the time, and everything would be cool. And so I did.

When you lose a sense of rhythm like that, when night blurs into day with only one thing on your mind (thesis-thesis-thesisthesisthesis), it is very easy to lose sight of the very reason you’re doing all that work. You just do it because you have to.

Now, a month and a half into life without degree requirements, I have rhythm again. Ups and downs, fasts and slows, left turns and right turns. I have a long list of things to try and people to catch up with, and the power to make those things happen or not happen. I have responsibility, real responsibility, for what happens next in my life, even if it’s just a matter of dinner tonight. And that, as it turns out, is the real challenge I was waiting for.

Sure, those things seem inconsequential compared to the usual, societally visible concerns like career-building or family-starting or home-buying, but I suspect that they are more than worthy of our deepest considerations. I’m realizing more and more that it’s little things that shape us into who we are. The hours we keep, the routes we walk to work, the places we choose to go on weekends, the people we share dinner with, even the speed at which we eat…

Fortunately, life now affords a wealth of opportunities for considering these little matters. And I intend to take full advantage of them. After all, in grad school I was only designing a thesis.

And now, I’m designing a life.

Let’s DO this!

This week, we were asked to write our own obituaries. This exercise is intended to get us thinking about what hopes and dreams we have for our lives. The teacher specifically challenged us to make this as ‘embarrassingly extreme’ as we can stand—in other words, to take this seriously. This is about as difficult as you might think. Imagining the context of your own death is brittle enough ice to wander on, but as someone who almost has an allergic reaction to self-aggrandizement, I had a really hard time getting started. The only thing that helped, in the end, was actually getting started.

But I did have to change who this was about. Meet… Someone.

Someone’s Obituary

Though impeccably practical to the very end, Someone was also an optimist and a dreamer, and her optimism was contagious. By the end of her career, she had empowered millions to realize their own tremendous human potential through the company she founded. Her tireless work has brought self-sufficiency and dignity to disadvantaged families around the world by matching economic opportunities with the knowledge and material support needed for anyone to answer to them. In doing so, she has made significant contributions to redefining what it means to do work in today’s society: her effort is one of the reasons that ordinary people today no longer speak of employment, but of entrepreneurship.

A lifetime of personal and familial struggles have given her the rare ability to rise above short-term setbacks; she tackled great obstacles with a positive, resilient attitude. Though far from perfect, she was known for her capacity for empathy. She insisted on treating even the staunchest of detractors with respect and compassion. But most of all, she was admired for her sense of humor, which often defused conflicts and created hope in even the bleakest of situations. Though her time with us was short, her life and actions serve as an inspiration to us all.

In lieu of flowers, please consider a charitable donation to the Someone Foundation, established to continue the work she has only just begun.

What did I learn from this assignment? I’m not immediately sure. But since I was raised in an environment where praise was hard-earned, not given, it makes sense that I’ve come to have ambitious aspirations. However, I am only human, so I also instinctively temper those aspirations with a healthy (hopefully non-lethal) dose of fear. This is probably why I had to write about Someone rather than myself, superficial as that may seem.

In the end, nobody is fooled: this obit is by me and for me. It does represent, in so many angelic words, the kind of person I want to be. It also represents the kind of tasks I want on my career to-do list. So for better or for worse, it will serve as a reminder of what I’m after. If I get lost, as 20-somethings are wont to do these days, I will have something to navigate by. And if I get bogged down in the day-to-day experience of being mortally small, I’ll always have someone impeccable to look up to, even if that person only exists in fiction.

… and really, I guess that’s not so bad for one little homework assignment.

EDIT: I feel like I should explain myself a bit here. After reading my obituary, some of my classmates were rather concerned about the “dying young” part. Trust me, I’m the last person here who plans to live fast and die young. I put that there mostly as a reminder to myself that the most precious thing in life (other than friends and family) is time. And it is never guaranteed. I just hope that I can make the most of every day, no matter how many of them I end up having. It’s not about being morbid, but about valuing that which we should never take for granted.

Watching the kickoff presentation in a packed auditorium at Parsons

(Yes that’s right. I’m taking a break to work my ass even harder, lose sleep, freak out, skip breakfast, and… as it were, make new friends while goofing off and having buckets of fun.)

Day 0

It started off promisingly enough. My team was solid, consisting of the irrepressible Gene Lu, the ultra-emphathetic Sera Koo, and my favorite badass code-slinger, Yang Yang. SVA IxDers + Yang was a good combination before, and I was confident we’d make something incredible together. We spent the evening before brainstorming at Le Pain Quotidienne, equipped with stickynotes, sharpies, chocolate mousse and tea.

Pre-game brainstorming with Gene & Sera... I'm sure the manager loved our crazy feast of sticky notes

Day 1

Alas, the morning of, Gene woke up feeling too sick to participate and Sera of course had to be by his side. So Yang and I ventured alone to Parsons, not sure of what to expect.

We arrived and were promptly shepherded into a large room, where tables were laid out with power strips. There was a short introductory presentation, then some people started to set up their laptops. We walked around looking for a group. Since this was a competitive hackathon, I was a little apprehensive. Would we end up with sufficiently able-bodied teammates? What if we were’t compatible, we didn’t work well together? What if I drive them crazy? At least my classmates were used to my numerous quirks.

I felt the first pangs of discouragement when the time was up for teammate hunting and we still had not found a group. They started to randomly assign us leftovers into teams together. I felt like the kid who was picked last in gym class. Oddly, I did not want to be with the other picked-last kids because, well, they were picked last too.

I will now admit that, at this point in time, it occurred to me that maybe I should just drop out and perhaps join the rest of my bedridden team. Maybe we’ll watch a movie or something.

But… as you can probably tell by the length of this post, I didn’t. And I am glad I didn’t. Because staying afforded me the opportunity to learn yet another good lesson about life:

The picked-last kids are great players for reasons you’d never expect.

In other words:

Don’t be a prejudgemental snob, even if attending an elite design program has subconsciously made you so.

My teammates ended up being everything a design hacker could want for a frenzied weekend of high-speed thinking and making: energetic, mutually supportive, hilarious, positive, helpful, intelligent. We bonded instantly. It was decided early on that there would be no pretensions, no apologies, no affected politeness. It would be blood, sweat, and tears (FUN tears!), and we were in it together.

Now we’re talking.

Eric and Aliona waste no time in getting down to business.

And what’s more, my teammates had something that ended up being a big advantage in hackathons: no idea whatsoever what a proper “design process” was. And this is good because really, when you have a little over a day to build something, who has the time for a discovery phase? How can you possibly fully “understand the problem space”? We had to agree on an idea as fast as we could based on pure instinct, and then roll up our sleeves to iterate on it like crazy. And that’s exactly what we did.

Voting on promising ideas: the sticky notes and graph paper takeover begins.

Of course, we did give fair consideration to a bevy of other promising ideas, including the brilliantly named SubCulture. It was going to be a site that lets you schedule and locate mini-events held in MTA subway cars. Niel DeGrasse Tyson lecturing on your morning commute, anyone? (It ended up that one of the other teams had happened on almost the same exact idea, and called it MTAcademy. Oh, shared headspace…)

The idea that we eventually ended up with was called EveryStep. It’s a random idea I had a long time ago for using run tracker data and micro-donations from friends to raise money for non-profits. Your friends would give your cause 25¢ for every mile you run, or something like that, thereby encouraging you to get active. And you’d be accountable to your cause, thus more motivated to run.

Some initial paper prototypes for key screens

We had a lot of fun with this, hashing out the details, slapping stickies everywhere, drawing delightfully slop-tastic wireframes and userflows, dissecting the finer points of human psychology, putting numbers into a spreadsheet to test feasibility of donation amounts, and even running impromptu user studies. Aliona and Emily went out to gather opinions from people on the street, Eric “A/B tested” some hand-drawn wireframes on fellow hackathoners, and I called my friends to gauge their willingness to use such an app. With actual feedback in hand, we were able to make decisions quickly, erase doubt, clarify points that needed to be clarified, and shore up the concept from all sides.

Eric does some guerilla user-testing on our fellow hackathoners

The sticky note and graph paper takeover is progressing nicely. It's accompanied by laptops now, and, briefly, small cupcakes.

Meanwhile, Yang was kind of off by himself coding a—and this absolutely fills me with the most loving kind of envy—Javascript runtracker that can count your steps via your iPhone browser.

Seriously. I didn’t know you could do that in a few hours.

By the time 8pm came around, we were being gently but firmly ushered out by janitors (so early, I know). But we were all pretty exhausted. Assignments were doled out for the evening, with promises to distribute files into Dropbox/email/Google Docs by midnight. We parted ways. Yang and I went home whereupon we continued work until 1am, and then we went to bed.

Day 3

I woke up early in the morning and saw that Aliona and Eric had kept good on their promises, but there was still more to do. At this point, I decided to take matters into my own hands and finish building the presentation myself. All those hours spent making SVA IxD pitch decks came in handy! Big pictures, compelling narrative, blah blah blah. I threw it all in a Keynote, cobbled together a last-minute concept diagram, and dragged Yang out of bed.

We arrived at Parsons at 11:10, just in time to catch the latter half of a presentation I didn’t want to miss—other friends from SVA IxD were also in the Hackathon, and they presented a beautiful pitch for an idea called “Purpose.” When they left, all bleary-eyed but happy to be done, Yang and I opened our laptops and continued to hack away quietly in the corner of the auditorium. Our other teammates soon arrived, bearing hydration—thank god for teammates. The minutes ticked down on the clock as we scambled to finish the presentation for our slot at 4pm.

Quietly working in the audience. Shhhh...

And then, at 2:30pm, I hit the export button and that was that. Whew… but we weren’t totally done.

After that, I still had to throw together the final designs for the demo. I had never designed so freakin’ fast in my life. The pixel-perfectionist in me died a little this afternoon. There was no time to nudge anything! None!

But perhaps, it’s for the better.

Perfectionism, as they say, is no way to live a life.

At some point Aliona ran out to get me a smoothie because I was running on empty. I can’t remember slurping it all down (I just remember asking her for something I could consume hands-free.)

And finally, finally, it was our turn to go up on stage.

Me probably saying something incomprehensible while my teammates lurked supportively in the shadows. How can one supportively lurk, you ask? Watch and learn!

This part was a blur. Obviously, we did not practice at all, but the show went on because it had to. All I remember was that I made the audience laugh a lot, something I seem to be good at in moments of massive internal panic. At some point I might have said this:

And then we were done. Done.

And yet we weren’t. Conversations with other teams followed. Connections were made. Emails written down. High-fives exchanged. Congratulations given.

Later: Bon-Chon consumed. Glasses clinked. Beers downed. Hugs given. Promises to keep in touch made.

Goofy pictures taken. There was some photo show going on in the Parsons lobby, with this great butt in it, and the opportunity was not to be missed. (Clockwise from center: Eric Schreiber, Emily Wagenknecht, Aliona Katz, myself, Yang Yang)

Time Passes…

Now I’m home, both exhausted and energized.

I signed up this weekend merely to free my thoughts from thesis. And to, admittedly, make a bid for the prize with an all-star team.

Instead, I ended up momentarily yet deeply involved in a scintillating community of energetic positive thinkers from schools and companies in NYC and beyond. I made friends, saw how other people think, and learned useful new attitudes towards designing in situations that weren’t grad school.

Grad school can be so small. Especially a grad school program that tops out at 15 people per class. To be sure, these people are brilliant, each and every one of them. But they are 15 nonetheless.

If nothing else, today was a reminder of the actual size of the world, and all the great things that lie beyond these dry-erase markered walls. Even in New York alone, there are so many awesome, intelligent, funny, upbeat people with interesting ideas, all striving to make a difference. And the only way for  me to make the most of this community when I graduate is to realize that SVA IxD, totally kick-ass program that it is, is not the entire world of design. It’s merely here to shape how I will approach design as I begin my career in the field.

And on that note, I’m off to kick this final semester’s butt!

Appendix

Here is the project slide deck, for your enjoyment:

Work hard
Be compassionate
Obsess less
Read more
Sketch daily

Happy 2012!