about me
Me and Design
I was born and raised in Sudbury, Ontario. It’s a small, French Canadian mining town that got 10ft of snow every winter. My parents are from Hong Kong, pretty much the opposite of Sudbury. This resulted in me learning Cantonese, French, and English kind of all at the same time. I am still mostly fluent in all three.
I majored in Artificial Intelligence because it sounded cool. At first I was doing a double major in math and life sciences. I ended up hating life sciences the first five minutes of college, and wasn’t sure I could do four years of just math. I switched to Toxicology until I realized it was just life sciences packaged differently. In second year I found Artificial Intelligence in my college’s course calendar. I had to make up a whole year’s worth of courses (yay summer school) because I had zero computer science background. Unless you count one high school course where I drew a house using q-basic… this is actually quite ironic because I distinctly remember that teacher telling me I should study computer science in college, and me saying “Yeah right, I would never do this if my life depended on it”. And there I was in second year of college, learning about complexity of sort algorithms, and writing code to solve mazes.
Getting into design was a complete accident. Not kidding. In my third year of college I was applying for an NSERC grant to continue some psychology studies I was doing at the time. My lab coordinator couldn’t find the application and instead gave me an application for an internship at the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center. I somehow convinced people there that I’d be great at doing interface design. Long story short, one of my mentors during this internship was Shelley Evenson, who convinced me to apply for the Interaction Design Masters program at Carnegie Mellon. She eventually became my graduate thesis project advisor. Not bad considering I didn’t even know what Interaction Design was at the time I was applying ;)
I feel pretty lucky to be doing design as a career. Given how this all happened pretty much by accident, it’s amazing that it brought me here. I’ve always been the type to really try and understand everything to solve a problem, and what better field to do that in than design! I’ve had the opportunity to solve all sorts of problems using the design process I inherited at CMU, by digging deep into people’s behaviors and motivations and by simply observing the world. It’s allowed me to help the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center create a new at-home health care business. It’s helped me design a solution to help HIV+ youth become more motivated to take their medication. It’s led me to advance the field in my own little way which eventually got into chapter 6 of Don Norman’s book, Living With Complexity. Yup, I feel lucky, and thankful to everyone who helped get me here.
Me and non-design… trivia style:
Current hobbies: crafting, playing piano in a chamber group, cooking, traveling, reading, tennis
Something I’m proud of: I started a chamber quintet in high school and within a year we were asked to perform for the then Governer General of Canada and her husband. That was pretty cool.
Favorite place I’ve visited: Galapagos Islands. Will definitely do this again in the future.
Childhood career dreams: marine biologist, concert pianist, doctor, travel writer, food critic. Pretty respectable, right? My sister’s dream was to be a cashier. She’s in medical school now. Go figure, she’s the one who now gets the “you’re going to be a doctor… fantastic!” and I get the “… wait, what do you do again?”.
Favorite place to live in San Francisco: Alamo Square. I’ve moved three times since living here, and all have been within a block of the park. I love it here :)
