3. (Re)Starting

After a busy school year, I am re-focusing on my personal design practice and plan to share weekly updates on my work. I would love it if you followed along!

Short Update

Grad school, it turns out, is a ton of work. My program - Harvard's Master of Design Engineering - is an intensive, two-year professional degree (taught jointly at the Graduate School of Design and the School of Engineering and Applied Science). Our studio theme – Work 2040 – allowed me and my classmates to explore and develop speculative design interventions for the future of work and non-work. I learned a lot about macro trends like AI, UBIs, and the rising cost of living, as well as more specific topics like music industry royalties, America's childcare crisis, and how ritual can combat addiction and rewire our brains.

Now that it's summer, I am focusing on passion work. I was honored to be selected as one of the Graduate School of Design's Community Service Fellows, and I will spend the next 10 weeks working with the incredible YouthLink to create a first-of-its-kind makerspace for empowering housing-insecure young people in their creative and entrepreneurial dreams. I also plan to spend much more time tending to my creative practice, reading for fun, and getting outside as much as possible. It's going to be a good summer!

Sharing my work

One of the things I'm most looking forward to this summer is spending more time on personal design projects. The thing I've struggled with, though, is getting into a consistent practice of sharing my work. So, during the summer, I aim to share an update every Thursday on my design work. I may also sprinkle in some occasional Tuesday posts about tools, books, or frameworks I find helpful for my projects.

Some of my projects are small weekend builds, while others I plan to make in small batches for those interested in trying them out. The one consistent thread through these projects is that they focus on some facet of personal health and wellness. Some examples include:

• 🍴 Flatware: A hand-carved set of eating utensils created over a three-day water fast ritual to reset my relationship with food
• 🎨 Cartograph: A life-mapping tool to help build a more consistent self-reflection practice
• 🪨 Lodestone: A distraction-free meditation speaker
• 👁️ Vision Board: A fun twist on the classic vision board
• And more...

Coming Up

Next week, I will share about Flatware: a hand-carving project that combines the power of ritual and design to reshape my relationship with food. On Monday, I will start a three-day water fast – a practice that shows potential for tremendous cardiovascular and glycemic benefits – and carve a set of wooden eating utensils. The goal is to create a lasting environmental cue (the utensils) that helps remind me of my commitment to slow down and be mindful of what I put in my body.

If this work interests you, please subscribe below to follow along! Every bit of support means a lot to me and helps motivate me in my dream to become an independent designer.