Introduction

This is a conversation between two impulses.

A stream of consciousness, if you will.

But let me backtrack. The following story of my personal design narrative and creative process are excerpts from my work in Design at the Edge, a course I took in my final semester as a student at Parsons The New School for Design. In this class, we discussed the the need to be aware of our own creativity and how to convey our ideas to others.

Today, more than ever, a social aspect is present in most of our work. I think to understand ourselves as artists and how we present our work speaks measures. Reading Professor Bruce Nussbaum’s book, Creative Intelligence, provided great insight on on creativity as a new form of cultural literacy and as a method of problem-solving and innovation. The specific competencies — Framing, Knowledge Mining, Playing, Pivoting — as well as the concepts of aura, ritual, charisma, and flow — help us understand what we do when we design, why we do it and how we can explain it to others.   

Hindsight is 20/20

For as long as I can remember, I’ve made it a habit to record my day to day life in different ways. I don’t necessarily have a particular ritual for recording that I stick to, and I don’t always record something everyday. Sometimes I write, sometimes I take pictures, sometimes I draw or sketch. I have notebooks with scribbles and thoughts and notes that date back to the last century… actually though.

These are mostly short entries pertaining to thoughts I had, things I did or need to do, observations I made, people I saw, food I ate — these are a quick glimpse into my life. Recently, many, if not most, of these records are digital. My iPhone has served as my daily chronicling tool since 2007.

I didn’t do any of these simple tasks for a specific reason, or so I thought. As always, hindsight is 20/20. It’s easy to look back on my actions and draw conclusions based on what I see now. I didn’t know it, but I was, in some way, “mining the past” and creating meaning from the information that I had. Especially since I guess we all grow somewhat older and wiser with age, I could reflect on these experiences that I had jotted down with a different mindset.

One time, a friend was reading over my shoulder as I was writing up a note at lunch.

“What’s this for?” he asked.

“Hmmm…” The question caught me off guard. I had never really thought about why I was doing what I was doing.

“I guess you don’t need a reason to keep a journal, huh.”

I guess so.

Chapter I.

A Brief Biography

Reading David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College commencement speech, the following quote seemed to resonate very deeply with me:

Blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.

— David Foster Wallace

Reading that passage from David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College commencement speech reminded me of a Chinese proverb that I had learned years ago but slipped my mind:

井底之蛙

“The Frog in the Shallow Well”

Despite its brevity, this saying has always resonated with me. It may only be a frivolous tale about a frog in a well, but it’s a story that’s lived for thousands of years, passed down generation after generation, that I learned at my weekend Chinese School in America.

Chinese School was one of extra-curricular activities that I never quit before graduating from high school and moving to New York City. In many Western countries, schools like these are established explicitly for the purpose of teaching languages and culture to Americans of different ancestries. I grew up in a the very multicultural San Francisco Bay Area of California and it wasn’t unusual for my friends and classmates to attend weekly Japanese schools or Hebrew schools as well. Just as thousands of other overseas Chinese people did, I spent every single Saturday morning attending Chinese school. For thirteen years. In some sense, I was getting more in touch with my “roots” and heritage, which looking back, was possibly the most valuable experience of my life.

Born and raised in the United States to Taiwanese immigrant parents, I spoke one language exclusively at home and another at public school. First and foremost, I’m Asian American, but I still manage to feel a connection with the rich history of China, where my ancestors emigrated from. My interest in art education is closely related to growing up in a politically dynamic cultural background; like the United States, Taiwan is an immigrant society. Art education makes us explore the origins of tradition and cultural heritage. It also evokes unity and mutual understanding in a society made of immigrants.

Because of my very international upbringing, I’ve always believed it was very important to incorporate different languages, cultures, and ideas into everyday life. My parents taught me to never settle for anything less. Especially being a student of design, I try to create with the understanding that one’s experiences inform one’s design practices. As such, I constantly push my own boundaries to explore and experience as much of the unknown as possible.

We can’t get complacent with what we have, just like the blindly certain frog in that well. While I may have started out with the advantage of a privileged upbringing: growing up bilingual and having dual-citizenship between two first world countries, I don’t want to ever feel complacent. Learning from this simple philosophy, I’ve become a total autodidact and trivia junkie. I’m fluent in four languages. I’ve lived in five countries and four states for extended periods of time. I’ve traveled to about two dozen different countries. And yet, I still would never consider myself “worldly” — and I don’t think I’ll ever be, but that’s my journey.

It is absolutely fascinating and horrifying that in less than a month, many of us will graduate from Parsons, and we’ll have some semblance of a future picked out for us. Of course, at any moment we can simply change directions if something goes wrong or we have a change of heart. But the days we used to talk and wonder about have finally arrived.

Life is the greatest gift that has been bestowed upon us. And I’m here to live it fully. I hope that I have the courage to step out of my own well and into my future.

Chapter II.

Phenomenology vs. Ontology

My favorite designers are: Dieter Rams, Naoto Fukasawa, Jony Ive, Frank Chimero, Jessica Hische, Mike Matas, John Maeda, and Oki Sato, just to name a few. These are the people that immediately came to mind when we drew our inspirational “people network.”

One of my most influential motivations in my design work is the Feltron Annual Reports by Nicholas Felton. Felton’s personal practice is known for its simple storytelling ability: he tracks and visualizes personal matters such as modes of travel, social relationships and conversation, food, and emotion, all for the sole product of this logging and visualization in the Feltron Annual Report.

Art is stylized data.

Nicholas Felton’s Annual Reports are illustrative of this cultural moment where the “anthropology of ourselves” is a more feasible reality. With so much social data being voluntarily created and shared, phenomenological and sociological analysis of human behavior has never held more potential. In the face of this, Felton is a documents in the the more traditional sense, extracting data from an action or thing, and deriving information through relationships between phenomena. He quantifies and visualizes the mundane, but in the end Felton’s annual reports are about the story, not the analysis.

Meaning-Making and Existence

The study of subject and objects of a person’s experience is phenomenology — that is, the science of phenomena: lived experiences, intentionality, meaning-making. While ontology is the branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature or essence of being or existence, the opposite of phenomenology.

My two impulses fall into these two categories.

Data as an anchor.

As you’ll see in the next chapter, in the infographic for my journal, one half of me records data and thinks about it in a very scientific way. At the same time, I project my thoughts and dreams in more abstract ways as well, trying to create meaning from something I want to understand. Using data as an anchor to help me discover questions about myself and the world around me.

We, as humans, are creatures who long for the unknown. There’s a sense of urgency that’s present when we try to understand a new concept…

I’m a frog, looking to know my world.

Chapter III.

Dreams vs. Reality

A log of 8 nights of sleep.

For my journal, I recorded sleeping habits daily during a time in my life where, surprisingly, I had almost no time commitments. This was the first time I’ve had such a free week during my time at Parsons. I was never required to wake up before 12 o’clock in the afternoon, so it’s apt to take a deeper look into my tendencies when I didn’t necessarily need to sleep early.

In my high school AP Psychology class, some of my favorite subjects we learned about included memory, sleep, and dream research. I keep an irregular and occasional journal of my sleep patterns and dreams, so I decided to expand that for this class and combine it with my interest in information architecture and visualization.

Every waking moment, we’re essentially aware of everything that is going on in our lives, and it’s easy to make grand assumptions based on what we see or feel, so I decided to track the hours of my day in which I’m unconscious. The juxtaposition of using scientific and mathematical data of my sleeping patterns with the more fluid and unreliable memories of dreams, was fascinating to look back on. According to my psychology teacher, the more you practice recalling dreams, the better you become at remembering them, and you increase the possibility of having lucid dreams or being able to continue a dream after waking up briefly. Towards the end of the week, I didn’t have to try to hard to recall dreams, whereas at the beginning of the recording period, there were several days where I would wake up with no recollection of my dreams at all.

I jotted down notes before I slept about what happened directly before I slept, such as whether I used electronics in bed and any particular foods I ate for dinner or before sleeping. However this information was inconclusive about how it affected my sleep quality because there were too few days; perhaps if this was a project spanned a longer period of time, there would be some form of correlation.

Using actigraphy, I was able to monitor my sleep cycles. During sleep, the body cycles between REM rapid eye movement and non-REM sleep. Typically, people begin the sleep cycle with a period of non-REM sleep followed by a very short period of REM sleep. The period of NREM sleep is made up of four stages, and a completed cycle of sleep consists of a progression from stages 1-4, then from 4 back to 1 before REM sleep is attained — each cycle lasts for about 90-120 minutes. Dreams occur during the REM stage of sleep, during this stage the eyes move back and forth beneath the eyelids, heartbeat increases, muscles twice, and breathing becomes more rapid. After about 15 minutes, the entire sleep cycle repeats itself.

I’m not much of a dreamer during the day, I don’t daydream often, as I’m slightly more of a realist than an optimist, but I have vivid dreams at night. They’re semi-realistic, in that, I’ve never been able to fly and I’ve never been someone else besides myself, but they’re still unusual, as dreams usually are.

Chapter IV.

Blocks

Tools of the Trade

I’m not exclusively right or left brained. I’m creative, but I love logic and numbers. I’m musically inclined with perfect pitch and good tune, but I enjoy writing and language. I’m intuitive but I also tend to think critically. Because of these characteristics, I try my best to incorporate these traits in thinking out of the box. But before we can even go about thinking outside of the box, we need something to jumpstart this, and these are my “blocks,” some positive, some negative, but they help me create.

Four years ago, I was the new kid on the block. I didn’t know what to expect, coming into this multidisciplinary department. But this excited me, in many senses I’m a chip off the old block, always trying to follow in the footsteps of my father, who also strays from the typical path and takes too many risks. This was the starting block of something entirely new. Sometimes I felt unprepared, like I had my head on the chopping block, especially during intense critiques during studio classes with strict professors.

Everything was made.

Design is something that imposes a shape on to the world around us. I sometimes look at this world through rose colored lenses. Of course, there are moments when I feel utterly drained — everyone has those moments. But I don’t want to go through the motions of everyday life and regret that I just let days go by where I wasn’t giving my all to everything and everyone. As an aspiring a creative professional, a creative block isn’t just frustrating — it’s potentially threatening to my career. When we rely on our creativity to pay the bills and build your reputation, we can’t afford to be short of ideas or the energy to put them into action. Mental blocks, writer’s block, stumbling blocks. Sometimes you have to put faith in your unconscious memory that is working away whilst you are in a creative block. When I experience these road blocks, I try to gather up all my feelings of regret, and use them as building blocks to do my best.

Chapter V.

Education

Parsons The New School for Design

The BBA in Design & Management at Parsons is a curious major. I often find myself having difficulty describing and pinpointing exactly what I do, because there isn’t a specific genre or category that encapsulates all of my work. At its core, this program educates students in the entrepreneurial and strategic aspects of design, as well as in design aspects of business. We have both project-based studio and seminar courses to promotes interdisciplinary learning through research and collaborative work.

This ambiguity, however, was one of the main reasons why I chose to enter this department when I was admitted to Parsons. There are definitely mixed reviews about this major, but I’m a firm believer in making the most out of everything I put my mind to, and I have wholeheartedly enjoyed my time in D+M.

In many ways this narrative is the ode that I want to write to Parsons before I leave. Just to sum up my thoughts.

Afterword

Doubt

I think most people would agree that ideas aren’t something that you can sit down and force yourself to create, but rather something that happens to you spontaneously. My mind is constantly coming up with ideas that really could never be implemented by myself or without a great deal of time or effort. Occasionally though, an idea will appear so small and simple that I can’t resist the urge to let it grow into something more real.

The idea behind this narrative is something that’s always been within me, but I’ve never attempted to put my thoughts into words. While I enjoy writing, I don’t do it leisurely for my own enjoyment.

Working on this idea for the past semester, talking to multiple people in various disciplines, gathering thoughts and ideas was a great attempt to solidify my ideas into something a little more tangible. Along the way I’ve had plenty of encouragement from friends but more than enough discouragement from myself.

Doubt is probably the one single greatest killer of ideas.

Pushing on though, sometimes feeling abandoned by my own lack of faith in myself, other times feeling on top of the world for figuring out some obscure analogy that could pull everything together into something that I can be proud of.

I’m not done with this idea though, it still isn’t a reality and I still have to keep pushing myself forward each day until I complete it. Otherwise, it’ll just be another idea that doubt killed and I won’t know what’s worse: that I didn’t have the ambition to follow through, or that perhaps I wasn’t at the right mindset to make it real.

So every day I hope to shove that doubt in all aspects of my life from my mind and focus on small, simple and easily achievable goals that inch me closer to my various goals. And every night when I eventually get to bed I can feel good about how far I’ve taken my idea.

There is something invariably sad about realizing how there really is no more time left here at Parsons.

One more week left until graduation, but I want to think of this essay as a checkpoint, as part of an ongoing project in this “journey of self-discovery.”

Thanks for reading.