Hello and welcome to the AIGA Design Podcast.
I'm Lee Sean Huang, Director of Design, Content and Learning
here at a IGA, the professional association for design.
I hope your summer's been going well.
I look forward to seeing you this fall at the AIGA Design
Conference in New York City. It's happening October 12th to
14th. Debbie Millman is returning as
the conference host this year, and she's been working hard with
the AIG, A-Team and conference cochairs Jennifer Kinnon and
Bobby C Martin Junior. We are excited to offer you an
inspiring lineup of speakers, dialogues, workshops, add on
events and more across New York City.
So if you're interested in joining us, learn more and sign
up at aiga.org. Ticket prices are going to go up
after September 7th, so be sure to register before then to save
money, but it's also looking like we're going to sell out
around that time, so definitely act fast.
If you're interested in joining us in person, we're also going
to be offering online tickets. If you want to watch the
mainstage speakers from home or wherever you find yourself in
the world. Again, aig.org is the place to
go. As for the podcast, we'll be
back in September with a new original episode, so stay tuned
for that. With those announcements out of
the way, the episode you're about to hear is a rebroadcast
of the Yellow Glitter podcast with Stephen Wakabayashi.
Yellow Glitter is a show that explores mindfulness through the
eyes and soul of queer Asian perspectives.
Stephen had me on his show to talk about community Centered
design, collective change, and my midlife creative crisis.
You can find Yellow Glitter wherever you get podcasts, so go
ahead and subscribe and listen to the other episodes of the
show there. Now without further ado, here is
episode 42 of the Yellow Glitter Podcast.
There's also something about the iterative process which is
inherent to any creative process.
But when you're designing together, right?
It's like, how do you say share your sketches or share your your
prototypes in a way that's authentic and allows for
participation, rather than waiting until you have something
that's far more polished, which like people are afraid to then
mess with right that. That's also something to think
about in terms of how imperfection is also an
invitation for participation. Hi everyone, my name is Stephen
Wakabashi and you're listening to Yellow Glitter Mindfulness
through the eyes and Soul of creation Perspectives.
This episode we're joined by an extra special guest, Lee Shan
Huang. Lee Shan Huang.
EBay is a queer first generation Taiwanese Cantonese American
designer and educator based in New York City and Providence.
He is the Director of Design, Content and Learning at a IGA
and a Cofounder Creative Director of FUSA.
He also teaches design and innovation at Parsons and SVA.
Welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Steven, and hi,
everyone. Hi.
I'm really excited to connect with you.
We were introduced through a mutual friend and it seems like
we've had many overlapping experiences and people and
spaces and I thought you would be an awesome guest and just
sharing a lot of what you're working on currently and what's
also coming up for you in your life right now.
I just wanted to ask first like what's been on your mind lately?
What's coming up for you? Well, well, a lot of things,
certainly in our country and in the world.
But starting with the more personal bit, I recently went to
my 20 year college reunion and so I'm 42 years old.
It's been 20 years since I graduated from undergrad at
Harvard. It was nice to see some people
who haven't seen in like over 10 years, some people in 20 years.
And I think it's just one of those life milestones, right, of
like, I guess I am officially middle-aged and what do I want
to do with myself when I grew up?
And some of these questions kind of continue even though I've
done cool things over 20 years since college, less so about
like comparing myself to my classmates because honestly,
I've taken sort of a path less traveled for a lot of Harvard
grads. So I don't think I have like the
same life or career milestones to compare myself against.
It's more just a a personal thing.
Wow, it's really been 20 years. This ride is probably more than
half over. Well, let me ask first before we
get into your like where, where has your classmates gone
primarily when you say like your pathway deviated a little
differently from them? Yeah, I don't know what it's
like today for more recent grads, but certainly, you know,
for a class of 2003, a lot of people went into investment
banking. They went to work at the Goldman
Sachs of the world or they went into working at McKinsey.
Like some people went straight into same Med school or Graduate
School of some kind or academia. You know, some people doing like
teach for America type things. I went to teach English in Japan
and then I got into design. And I'm happy to say more about
that story. But yeah, that that's kind of
what happened, right? Or people went into like law or
these kind of professions where you kind of know where the
milestones of success are, whether like you make partner or
not or start your own law firm or or whatever, right.
Or the same at McKinsey type things.
And so I haven't had that. I've worked in government or
worked for my own studio or now I'm working in nonprofit and
academia. So it's more about for me a kind
of portfolio career of having multiple things going on at the
same time rather than than these like traditional milestones of
getting the corner office or making partner or what?
Yeah. Which is interesting because I
feel like the typical Asian path would be exactly that, right?
Go to McKenzie, go be a doctor. Go be a lawyer.
And I'm just curious, even for you, stepping into the realm of
creativity and design, what has that journey been like,
especially in navigating Asian family dynamics?
Yeah, I think in the scheme of things, as it relates to career
stuff, my parents were pretty hands off compared to some of
the stereotypes. So both of my parents have
master's degrees. They ended up with a successful
small business selling computers in suburban Phoenix, AZ, where I
grew up, and they're retired now.
But as it related to growing up, like they were really open to me
doing creative things, I guess they're.
I did have the stereotypical Asian thing of going to piano
lessons and I also played cello for a while, so I did do that.
But besides that, I think I took like 2 SAT kind of crash courses
and practice tests and then I took it twice, got the same
score, and then the rest is kind of history there.
But there was never any pressure to like, oh, you have to major
in whatever, right? It was pretty hands off and kind
of after college too. There was a period when I came
back from Japan where I was considering going to culinary
school, which I didn't end up doing, but they were pretty cool
with that idea too. It wasn't that you have to do
XY&Z kind of thing. That's fascinating.
I'm curious, what do you think opened your parents up to you
having a more creative career pathway?
Because I I'm just curious, do you think it was like the
experience of their entrepreneurship, the forensic
computing? Because that's typically not the
norm for a lot of Asian, Asian Americans.
Yeah. I mean, I think in some ways it
comes from a certain privilege, but also their own, I guess,
less linear journeys. Like my dad was actually a
chemical engineer and his specialty was in, I guess, what
we call fracking now. But he couldn't get a job in
that when he got out of grad school in the 80s and so ended
up with some business partners, some other Taiwanese Americans
who started like doing essentially import export stuff
of computer parts and then building their own PC's and
selling that to companies and and government offices and stuff
like that. So I think there's already that
of like them seeing that you can go study something but then life
will throw you a curveball. And then they ended up being
super successful at that. So I think that that's a part of
it. And then there's also, as a
result of that kind of success, I don't think they depend on me
to take care of them in a way. And I was talking to another
friend of mine who comes from an immigrant family, in his case
from an Ecuadorian family. And you know, he does feel more
of a responsibility now as an adult to like take care of his
mom financially as she gets older and works less and is kind
of transitioning into retirement.
But my parents are fine, you know, financially.
So I think part of that was also like a a relief on that side.
So I guess you have part privilege and part like personal
journey in terms of the hands off part.
And I think it's like, OK, I already did what they dreamt of,
I guess by getting into Harvard. And So what I do afterwards.
That is true. You got you want some Asian
child points, and I feel like that experience, especially with
your family working with computers, was your introduction
at a very early age to computers, right?
Yeah, definitely. My first computer was a
Commodore 64, which I guess for the young people listening to
this was like a computer that you plugged into your TVI.
Think they had like floppy disks as well as these like cartridges
that looks like Nintendo cartridges that you could plug
into there. They went to schools with Apple
two E's and stuff like that and Amigas to take a trip down
memory lane. But basically through that.
I worked there for a few summers when I was in high school at my
parents company like assembling custom P C's.
But I also had the chance to take part in some like after
school programs and summer programs that were run out of
Arizona State University which are I think now defunct now,
which is kind of sad. But there was something called
Cap, the Center for academic precocity and it was essentially
for like a gifted kids to learn different things.
And so I got to learn like computer programming with Lego
logos. You can make like this little
turtle draw on your screen or make your Lego motors move.
And then I also had the opportunity to take classes in
like TV production and video production as a teenager.
So having those opportunities from a relatively young age
where my kind of soft entry into design and creative content
production. That's interesting.
And I'm curious, did you also have a career just doing
programming or did you go directly more so into creative
design career afterwards? Yeah, I did learn how to code a
little bit. I think I'm more like a designer
who can do a little bit of coding, but I was never like a
developer or anything like that, just to give some broader
brushstrokes. So it was undergrad at Harvard.
I actually studied political science and was interested in
going into, yeah, into like either diplomacy or the NGO
sector or something like that. And that was part of what
brought me to Japan. Both kind of.
Well, there's some family connection as well.
So being Taiwanese, my maternal grandparents actually spoke
Japanese because they grew up during the colonial era, but
they used it as like a secret language so that my mom and her
siblings wouldn't understand, right.
So it kind of skipped a generation.
But we grew up around the food and other cultural things, so
there was that. Plus I wanted to have some more
experience living abroad and improving my language skills.
So I went on the JET program, which is like a Japanese
government program to teach English.
There I would see, like, OK, do I want to go to grad school or
whatever kind of Fast forward a little bit.
I came back to the US, landed in New York City, worked for a
couple of years in the nonprofit sector, doing essentially like
political communications. So like, e-mail campaigns, early
social media kind of campaigns for environmental and human
rights causes. And then from there, that's when
I was like, OK, well, I have this computer stuff going on,
most of it from like being a teenager and just messing
around. I'd also like taught myself how
to do some graphic design, music production, because I also
played in bands and so we made our own stickers and album
covers and stuff. But I felt like I needed more
kind of structured learning in that sense because this is, this
is like 2006, 2007, 2008. So this is before like you could
just watch pretty much any tutorial on YouTube.
Or that was pre YouTube. Those, like, have videos on
YouTube at that time? Yeah.
So it was more like YouTube was more like America's Funniest
Home Videos at that point than like the library of everything.
So I went to NYU basically for for grad school at a program
called ITP Interactive Telecommunications Program,
which is this kind of cryptic name for a program that was
founded in the late 70s, but it's basically like art, design,
and technology. So I did that, worked at a
creative agency for a few years, then started my own studio,
FUSA, and then also started teaching a couple years after I
graduated as well. So those are kind of how I got
into the design world more officially.
Yeah. That's so so fascinating and
that I'm also I see a lot of trends where often times,
especially people who weren't necessarily trained and designed
as academic right undergrad or early on, that we do design as a
part of just. Checking some of the boxes
right. In your case, creating stickers
for your bands, doing Flyers, and that allows folks such as
yourself to go, oh wow, this is actually fascinating and I'm
just curious, especially in doing the creative work and
pivoting into some of that stuff after going into grad school.
I'm just curious in terms of just coming up for you of just
even if starting your own agency like what has?
Led you to that point because often times, you know, some
people are just so mirrored by like, Oh my God, there's so much
I can do that it's Even so overwhelming to start your home
path in doing your own work. Yeah, I think part of it was
necessity and part of it was also not knowing better.
So that resulted in some maybe stupid bravery.
So what I mean by that is I had been working at the same agency
since my second year of my master's program.
It's called Purpose. They're still around.
I think they they sold to a larger holding company, but they
still exist and I had a lot of opportunities there to grow.
I was actually the 1st in house designer that they hired.
I got to do some recruiting work to build out a design and tech
team. I had the chance to help open
the office down in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
So I lived and worked in Brazil for a while as well.
So it was a great opportunity and I learned a lot.
I think after a few years, though, I had like, I guess 1/4
life crisis then, since we're talking about my midlife crisis
now, where I was like, OK, well, what does this mean?
It felt like my only path forward at purpose or at
somebody else's agency was to either go into the kind of
strategy account management side of things or kind of double down
on my design skills, which I think wasn't necessarily a match
for what they were looking for in a small team.
So some other life factors happened.
So my business partner, who's also now my husband, got laid
off from a consulting job and had to move cities back to New
York City. And then Hurricane Sandy
happened. So we lost power for a few weeks
and then that was like a kind of like, I guess shaking up the
snow globe kind of moment in terms of what are you doing with
your life. And I don't know when you're
like sitting in the dark with no TV or Internet or hot water and
like, why don't we just start our own design agency?
Because things can only get better from here, I guess.
So that was one of the things. And I guess if I had known a
little bit better about what that would entail, I may not
have done it. So I think there is some sort of
like advantage to slightly youthful ignorance in some
cases. Yeah, OK, off Tanger.
But like, were you South of Manhattan?
During Sandy, yeah, so we I was actually living.
I had my own studio apartment done in the financial district.
I was evacuated. The building flooded.
It was when the building flooded.
They actually told us, oh, well, you can't move back for like at
least six months, if at all. Luckily it ended up being like 6
weeks and they, you know, brought in a generator and
pumped out a whole bunch of water.
And my apartment itself was on the 10th floor, so nothing
happened to my actual apartment. And then my partner at the time
was living in Stitetown, so on 14th St.
Ave. B.
So it was still in darkness. And I had actually like I went
to his place the night of the storm.
So we saw and heard the flash of light at the Con Ed plant and
then like you know 2 minutes later like all lights out.
So it was that. But his his family lives on Long
Island and we also had friends up in Harlem so we could like go
and shower and stuff. So it was Okay.
Yeah, yeah. And I feel like finally New York
is starting to build past so much of because I'm also in
financial district right now and finally like a lot of the stuff
that got decimated by Sandy or starting to finally get built up
but aside from the fact. I really also love just the work
that you're doing today, which I think is quite fascinating
knowing your background, studying political science and
also design. I feel that a lot of the stuff
that you do now kind of is at the intersection and I'm just
curious coming out of your studio and just seeing what was
next for you? What made you want to pivot
towards something that was more equity centered or thinking
about how you're? Establishing equity for
communities around you? Yeah, I think even when I was
doing FUSA full time, our design practice is what we called
community centered design. And I think that comes from my
background in essentially activism, community organizing.
For these other things I've done before, whether it was for
cultural exchange, working in Japan or environmental human
rights issues, is that you have to both communicate and create
artifacts, whether it's the e-mail blast or the posters or
or whatnot, as well as enable people and encourage people to
take collective action on something in their community.
So even at FUSA, we were starting to evolve in that
direction. Obviously we did some corporate
work and some startup work to pay the bills, but we started
pivoting into some government contracting, some service design
and codesign with various communities.
Designing public services in New York is an example of that.
And then kind of a few things, right?
Like in 2018 my husband went back to school at MIT, so we put
our studio more on like a side hustle kind of mode.
I took a job at a IGA, which is the oldest and largest
professional association for design.
I'm kind of in a hybrid, like community and content and
education role there. And then I've been teaching this
whole time, so there's what I do in my design work.
And then more recently, I was elected to be part of the
bargaining committee at the New School, which is where the
Parsons School of Design is based and where I've been
teaching since 2016. And I thought it was like, just
basically, actually, two of the organizers from our union were
on my podcast at a IGA. And we just kind of kept in
touch after they were on my podcast.
And they're like, oh, do you want to run for this bargaining
committee thing? And I said yes, I thought it was
like, OK, we're just going to negotiate a contract and I'll
get to learn about how this stuff works and fine, you know,
a few hours over a few months. And then it Long story short it
kind of spiraled a little bit in terms of the contentiousness of
the contract between the part time faculty which make up
nearly 90% of the teachers at the new school and the
university management. We ended up going on strike for
25 days last fall in November, December, which is the longest
adjunct faculty strike in U.S. history and then ended up
getting a contract which was a compromise but was
overwhelmingly approved by our membership.
So I think I see that actually as an extension of my design
work of like essentially how do you create power and how do you
exercise power collectively and more traditional forms of
designer part of that in terms of like social media posts that
I was creating, I was doing communications, PR stuff with
the press, making videos and stuff like that to communicate
with our different stakeholders. But I think the larger picture
really is the the building power bit.
Which I think is really. I think it's really the essence
of creativity, right where we were having a discussion and
just creating some show notes for today's podcast.
And one thing that came up in our discussion right was this
construct of creativity and what is it for?
And it seems as though creativity is also paramount to
shifting where communities go, how we can reimagine our lives
and break out of existing systems.
And creativity is. Not just something where you
draw pretty pictures, right, or create a pretty website, but it
is so, so important as a part of changing trajectories for
communities. And I wanted to ask you just
like, what were some things that come up for you, especially in
talking about that as a this aspect of creativity?
Well, there's a lot I can say about that.
I'm thinking about how to organize that a bit.
The first thing I'll say from the personal perspective is it's
actually taken me these 20 years to figure out how to connect my
undergrad background in political science with design.
I thought it was like, OK, I'm just taking like a like a big
pivot and just leaving that stuff behind.
But actually it's been been cumulative and I've actually
just been incorporating that into my design practice or
creating a hybrid practice. So that's one thing, just like
having a realization of that for me personally and my message for
designers thinking about this is that we often think about design
in terms of like pixel perfection or building products
and all of these sort of things which are important on the craft
side. But ultimately it's about power,
right? In a capitalist context, it is
about the return on investment for investors, for your company
making profit and all of that sort of stuff.
But that's just one form of power.
You can also think about building power in terms of what
you enable your users as individuals or as members of
communities, allowing them to do.
What is social media empowered in terms of people being able to
build livelihoods or to create political movements, etcetera.
So there's that part of it. And then also thinking about
design as more than like a mirror that reflects trends and
things that are going on in our society.
It's both that and a map, right, in terms of a road map for where
we can go. And so thinking about design as
future making as well, which I think you've alluded to is like
where putting something out there at a product, a service,
whatever that may be that didn't exist before.
So how does that change the world?
How does that create new forms of possibilities for people?
So that's kind of how I think about it personally and
philosophically and I'm happy to go down any of these other
threads and examples if you want.
Yeah. I think there's so much to
there. And I'm just curious, like which
one out of all of them do you personally resonate with,
especially at this moment of time in your life?
I think in light of current events and also my recent
experience with the strike and the contract negotiations at the
New School, I've been thinking a lot about design education and
the role of design educators. And what I mean by recent events
is the Supreme Court cases, in particular the one striking down
student loan relief and the one striking down affirmative
action. And for me, as it relates to my
corner of the world is design education and who gets to be a
design right? Who gets to go to design school,
but also who is teaching design school?
And some of the issues in both the business model in terms of
how we pay for it, how the people who teach are paid or how
little we're paid, as well as the mental model of how do we
even think about college education, right.
How do we think about it as more than just like this individual
good or investment in yourself, but something that's collective?
And how does that open up different ways of thinking about
how we finance it and how we value it as a society?
So I've been thinking a lot about that while still kind of
working in an imperfect system, teaching as an adjunct, because
I want to work with students. And there are parts of it that
do work right in terms of allowing me to be in the
classroom and do what I like. And having taught for more than
a decade now, like I have former students, we're now kind of
professional peers. Being a part of that is, is also
kind of amazing to be building out the the next generation.
So I think I'm, I'm thinking a lot about that as it relates to
how we started this podcast talking about my mid career
crisis of sorts. So that's the positive end of
things. But also seeing that, especially
coming out of the strike last year that we won a battle, but
there's still very much an uphill battle, I guess, there or
sort of headwinds that we're facing in terms of the larger
economic situation, in terms of inflation and cost of living,
but also the underlying business models that are still very
imperfect as it relates to equity and and whatnot.
So you're happy to talk more about that, but I think that's
what I've been thinking about a lot.
Yeah. And when you talk about
representation, are there any specific communities that come
to mind that should have a bigger seat in the design realm?
Yeah. So at a IGA, we have done some
polling in the past. I think the last one was from
20/19 and our design census and we found that well not
surprisingly design still tends to be overwhelmingly white even
compared to the general population.
I think Asian Americans, and this is without drilling down
into what Asian American even means, right, which is also very
diverse term, but Asian Americans are slightly
overrepresented. And then we know that black and
Latino designers are highly underrepresented compared to the
general population in the US of those communities.
So that's an issue. But then just kind of looking at
my corner of things, what we see is that actually most of my
students are Asian, but they're usually from Asia, whether
they're like from China or from Korea.
They're more likely to be from those places than from, like,
Chinatown, even though I've taught in, like downtown New
York City universities, right from Flushing or or these other
communities. So again, there's all sorts of
disambiguation we can do with some of these statistics, but
that's just to paint some broad brush strokes.
But if you look at who's teaching design, that's
certainly not represented right. I've had students say to me it's
like, oh, wow, you're the first one of the first Asian
professors I've had in design school.
So that's certainly something that we could improve on as
well. And that goes back to some of
this business model of like adjunct teaching, right, Which a
lot of design schools depend on. I think in the ideal world
scenario, it does make sense in terms of OK, we want working
professionals in design or other creative industries to teach
part time so students get like real life industry professionals
in the classroom. Where this starts to break down
is like one just because you're good at what you do in a
creative field, in design or whatever else doesn't mean
you're a good teacher at that. And there's often not a whole
lot of support for that. So there's there's high
turnover, right? Or people get busy with their
primary careers and then they stop teaching, etcetera.
In my case, because I was teaching before I became a
designer, I was able to incorporate that, and I think
that's one of the reasons behind my longevity in teaching.
But the reality is that a lot of adjunct instructors in design
and in other creative fields are depending on their teaching jobs
to pay for their health insurance, to pay their rent.
I know while they're trying to make their small businesses
work, whether it's in fashion or graphic design or as performing
artists and whatnot, which is a lot of my colleagues when we
were organizing our strike, their stories about how they
handle things. So it's some, in some ways, I'm
very privileged, and that way I don't depend on teaching to pay
for my health insurance or pay my bills.
I do because I want to. But I also think that we can't
just depend on people like me to teach, because that's also an
equity and diversity issue for our students, right?
We can't just have the most privileged designers and
creative professionals teaching students, because that's not a
fair representation of what it's like to be a designer or
creative professional. And obviously there's the
there's going to be like the gender and kind of racial ethnic
biases built into that. If we're depending on just the
most privileged designers who can afford to teach doing that.
And then if you go too far the other way of like having
precarious teachers, then the education suffers as well in
terms of like, we're only paid by our contact hours or we were
until our new contract. And what that means is it may
look like we're paid a lot on paper, like a 127 one, $35 per
hour, but that's just in classroom time, right?
You might spend like 10 hours outside of class prepping for
your lessons, grading student work, doing office hours.
All of that is like or was uncompensated time.
So if you do the math, it ends up being like minimum wage work
for some people. And So what that means is if a
student wants like some extra help with office hours, like
sometimes the teachers are like, sorry, I can't afford to meet
with you, right? Or maybe they wouldn't say that
so so straight up, but like, that is a reality, right?
And then the students are still paying like $50,000 a year to go
to these design schools. So that's what I mean in terms
of giving these concrete examples about the business
model behind it and how a lot of it is run on these myths that
don't necessarily reflect reality and our aspirations.
Yeah, I think you touched on a lot of great points.
What's resonating most with me first is there's broken systems
in academia that we really need to challenge, especially with
the contact hours or how teachers are being paid.
It doesn't feel as though you're incentivizing good teaching or
good curriculum creation or good interaction with students,
right? You're almost incentivizing do
the bare minimum because you're going to get still paid the same
amount regardless. And along the lines of that, how
often have we right going back to oh, you're bringing a
professional in. How often you know you and I,
I'm sure we were and everyone listening.
You can name that boss, that colleague that.
It's just like. Yeah, I really struggle to work
with you and that. And it's like, how did you get
here? And I imagine them being a
teacher, right? Yeah.
Exactly. And this whole concept of, you
know, now it's just a competition of different
accolades or people who've done certain things, getting these
position of teachership and it just becomes a little bit
contentious in terms of like, well, what are you really
championing, right? And I think especially if we
want to change the fundamental way that we're bringing in
students, bring in new concepts, so we also have to fundamentally
change who's doing the teaching too.
Totally 100% agree. Yeah.
Also, I've had many conversations with other
instructors too in the design industry and a lot of the stuff
that's even codified right in the textbooks.
And the stuff that you're teaching is very white, CIS,
Eurocentric perspectives of design.
And what's so fascinating with even where I'm reading
personally, a ton of books by other diverse, by POC, queer by
POC design authors is starting to understand creativity exists,
whether we don't want to acknowledge it or not.
And that the process of thinking about creativity, solutioning,
all this stuff. Has already been around native
tribes, ancestral tribes, people from different nations and
different places have had a way that they're creating their own
version of creativity, community organizing, problem solving.
But we're oftentimes leaning more towards a lot of these,
like white Eurocentric perspectives that the craziest
part was one of my volunteers. I put together slide.
In teaching one of her curriculums, and the intention
wasn't to point out what we were trying to do.
We're just like, okay, let's just, you know, give honor to
some of the people who set up the, you know, the realm of user
experience. And when we saw all the faces on
the slides, we're like, they all look the same, right?
We're like, I think we need to change the message of this
slide. Yeah, I think there's definitely
work that needs to be done in terms of challenging these sort
of like important historical figures and developments,
whether it's like the Bauhaus or how user experience design came
about and like recognizing that history, but also recognizing
that like these things that came out of a certain place and time
and culture are not universal, right.
And that even design as we know it right in the quote UN quote
Western context comes out of the Industrial Revolution.
And this separation or this bifurcation from like maybe
traditional craft where the fashion designer was also making
the dresses or the Shoemaker was like designing the shoes and
making them to now we have machines or now we have assembly
lines of people making things like the planning is now
separate from the baking, right. And so that's one context.
But then there's design in like the most general human context,
which is intentionally shaping our environment to create some
sort of desired result, right. And from that, that connects to
what you were mentioning before of like traditional cultures,
indigenous cultures, all of these things that don't have to
be necessarily industrial or western, but are still very much
designed. And how do we.
Yeah, recognize that and broaden the cannon, if you will, and
recognize the sort of diversity within what design signifies.
Absolutely. And it's so fascinating too
where it's just I feel that at least the western lens community
design is becoming a little bit more trendy over the past few
years. But if you look at it just like
the way indigenous communities had Co created with one another
and not even having specific territorial lines and this whole
blurring of just like what does even community mean?
We. Don't realize so much innovation
that we've actually lost in only highlighting certain communities
specifically why it's his Eurocentric perspectives as the
champion And so at least for myself in a lot of the work that
I do I'm always pushing for people to brought in the horizon
and. What's funny was at one point in
my career, I was all about, you know, naming these top companies
and the design methodology that they had.
And now I'm like, whenever they come up, my skin just crawls and
I'm like, you know, let's, let's change even the wording or like
how we're honoring some of these practices and let's move away
from continuously highlighting certain organizations, corporate
structures of doing specific methodologies of design.
But also just like. Broadening it and I think it's a
big learning experience for especially.
I find people just entering the foray of design because you're
just like the allure of oh, I want to be the very best.
You keep chasing after this goal.
But I'm just curious especially for folks who are in the
creative realm, some of our listeners in terms of just like
taking some of the learnings and some of the things that.
Have been a part of your journey of how do you create more
equitable spaces? How are you teaching more
equitably or creating more equitable results with equity
center design practices? What are some of your
recommendation or tips of ways that people can approach their
work or even just shift their thinking?
Yeah, I guess I'll give it like a really tactical example
because I think it's a way to be concrete, which is often we
think about workshops or codesign sessions as one of
these kind of keystone touch points interactions within a
community centered design process, right.
So you have different stakeholders in the room, but I
think the first point here is to like just recognize the
different power dynamics in that room, right.
So there may be people who have great ideas, but there's already
what I call the first filters. Like they don't share those
ideas because they don't want to be seen as like stupid or absurd
or whatever by their peers, by their boss, whatever.
So it's like, OK, just because you have the diversity in the
room doesn't mean that these ideas are available.
Or rather than like safe spaces, I like to talk about brave
spaces. Right?
So how do you create a few ways? Is to think about the different
ways that allow people to contribute at their best, right
in a lot of these formats, right Of like codesign or
brainstorming all of that. They tend to favor people who
are like extroverted and quote UN quote confident, which often
means like dominant groups. Like tends to favor like white
males who have advanced degrees. Not all the time, but like that.
That's the sort of bias, right? Or that's tipping the scale.
So how do you bring in other ways for people to either
contribute anonymously? By be writing something down,
putting it in a box? So even having like quiet Time,
certainly with the normalization of more remote work because of
the pandemic that's helped a little bit of like okay, you
don't have to like physically write the post it and then it go
up to the whiteboard, right. It's like it's easier and like
fig jam or barrel or whatever to just like contribute that way
without it being like okay. You have to like put yourself
out there physically to participate.
So I think there's technologies and ways of doing this through
facilitation that allow like introverts, extroverts, people
from different cultural backgrounds to participate.
And so it's about challenging these defaults or having
multiple pathways to participate.
I think that's my general and also very tactical advice that I
would give for that. Yeah.
And I I think that's so important especially while
you're saying it's like really tactical.
I feel like oftentimes we're trying to solution and this
isn't really for just specifically designs, it's just
like working to totally. Where I think often times
there's also trying to think about the solution, but the
reflection is, before we get into the solution, who are we
meeting with? Who are we working with?
And one workshop that we've been doing also on ours, my side is
doing an assessment of just like what are your own individual
intersectional identities, you know, what identities you
encompass. That's visual.
That's invisible. And also doing assessment of
your team and using those as specific data points.
I have you to analyze what you may be missing.
And oftentimes, like the example is in tech, right?
You might have diversity in skin tones and diversity in gender,
but when you look at, for example, socioeconomic status,
everyone is pretty much at the same socioeconomic status,
making the same decision more often.
Decisions that affect people at a much lower socioeconomic
status. And so it's an interesting
practice that I love that you just center as a part of it,
which is reflecting on just who's having a discussion and
who's actually creating so that we can usher in new ideas and
experiences. Totally, yeah.
And it's also like when we think about service design and systems
design in general, right? Who's closest to these touch
points? Who's closest to these problems,
right. And there's only so much like
undercover bosses stuff that you can do.
But it's like, I mean, I'll just use my own example of, like,
adjunct professors, right? Like, we're actually in the
classroom, whereas these administrators often are not,
right? It's been a long time since
they've been in the classroom. And they're thinking more in
terms of, like, Excel spreadsheets, right?
And like abstractions rather than, like what actually works
in the classroom. So there's things like that as
well of like who's closest to something and how do we value
that, even if they're not at the top of these corporate or
organizational pyramids? Yeah.
And I'm curious if just looking at the work that you're doing
and just being so open minded and welcoming for other
communities. I'm just curious if also your
queer identity has played a role in just shaping the way you're
starting to usher in some of these new experiences and ideas
for yourself even. Totally.
I think like as it relates to like creativity and innovation,
queerness is kind of a superpower.
And I I said that partially, jokingly and I'll explain why.
You know, like in on one side I don't want to sort of like
exoticize like the the creative queer person stereotype, right.
But on the other, there is something in terms of queerness
as a political project that is about challenging norms and like
quote UN quote best practices of how we organize ourselves as a
society, right, or as a company at the micro level.
And so that sort of norm challenging is essential to
innovation. And I say this also just as a
facilitator and a trainer, where I've been brought into companies
who want to learn how to be more innovative and learn design
thinking. And it's OK.
Well, you can take this workshop with me and you can learn about
some of these frameworks and some of these methods.
But ultimately you have to change the culture and what you
do, right, As the people want often the results of innovation,
but they don't want to do what it takes to be innovative in
terms of like changing business as usual or being a little silly
sometimes and kind of getting to that point right.
And I think you mentioned like intersectionality before, which
again is one of those like super loaded buzzwords.
But what it means for me in this context too is like being first
generation Taiwanese American. And like, even my Taiwanese
side, like my dad's family is Cantonese and my grandparents
were from China. So, like, my family was already
multicultural before we were American.
Like having come to the US four years old.
Like, I speak English like somebody who's born in Arizona.
So there's like the sort of insider, outsider kind of
perspective. Or it's like Taiwanese people
think I'm totally American, but then there's still the, like,
perpetual foreigner thing in America.
So there's that part. But that's also a superpower as
it relates to queerness, right? Depending on passing in some
cases, not passing in other contexts, but being able to
understand that because often times when we talk about norms
and how you challenge norms, it's like the water that we swim
in as fish, right. And to be like, I guess
partially amphibian, if you work on this example, right, this
metaphor, it allows you to see what these norms are.
So you can challenge. So yeah, lean into that.
Wait, I I've never actually heard that analogy, but I love
it. Because what comes up for me is,
is that quote right? Where it's like, how do you
explain water to a fish when that's all they've been
surrounded by and this aspect of like, being an amphibian or it's
just being queer? And also a book that comes up to
mind. I don't know if you've read it,
but The Queer Art of Failure amazing, amazing book which is
around queerness as failing. Heterotypical norms, right.
And that in that it is a political movement, it is
substantial for progress, for just diverse livelihoods.
And the fact that there's so much benefit from also not
succeeding in a way that allows us to open our minds to what is
actually in what we quote, UN quote, identify as failure.
It's like a very matter conversation but and the book
breaks it down really well, but. What I love is it's it's the
fact that the existence of queerness and being queer
ultimately opens other people up to like a fish becoming
amphibian, just opening up to the possibilities of different
livelihoods. Totally.
That book is on my reading list, but I'll have to bump it up
higher up for my summer reading. Yes, it's so good.
I was recommended from another person, just like very very much
in the books and. I was like, what is one book
that you'd recommend? And they were like, we're an art
of failure, hands down. But I think it's interesting
too, right? The reframe of it's embracing
failure, right? Because failure, right?
I'm sure you've also talked about this with your students,
where a lot of designers have perfectionism tendencies, right?
There's like this vision that there is perfection.
When reality perfect is so relative.
What looks good to one may look different, I don't want to say
awful, but different to another. And we put these scales of how
we're measuring success to, you know, certain individuals based
on different constructs. And I think the more that I've
been in this work, the more that I'm continuing to do design,
working with communities, the more that I realized that
really, even when I hold certain forms of perfectionism.
Whether it's within the work or within just even myself, that it
is an opportunity to also reflect what are things that I'm
holding so tightly onto that I can maybe loosen myself with.
And I think failure, there's a whole discourse of failure in
like startup culture and innovation culture as well,
right about like fail faster and fail forward, which is like, I
mean there's like kind of a douchey side of that as well
which like also hides privilege in terms of like.
To move fast, break things, yeah, it's like who is allowed
to fail? Or like who are you breaking
things for and what are the consequences and accountability
for that? I think the This Queer art of
failure has a different take on the idea of failure, but
definitely see like some parallels here.
But as it relates back to what we're talking about before in
terms of like community centeredness, community centered
creativity, community centered design, there's also something
about the iterative process which is inherent to any
creative process. But when you're designing
together, right? It's like how do you say share
your sketches or share your your prototypes in a way that's
authentic and allows for participation rather than
waiting until you have something that's far more polished which
like people are afraid to then mess with right?
Or the people who are willing to mess with those also are sort of
biased towards certain dominant groups who will like, you know,
you're like, sure, I'm going to like, blow this up and you can
start from scratch. But yeah, that.
That's also something to think about in terms of how
imperfection is also an invitation for participation.
Oh, I love that imperfection as an invitation for participation.
There you go. There's the.
Tweet one of your 600 that you're going to get today, Yeah.
Exactly. Or the Twitter is just.
Dumpster, I was like, I think Elon just instituted like you
can only read up to a certain amount per day, yeah.
It's, yeah. And I want to touch on one thing
I just earmarked for myself was even going back to the Supreme
Court decision knocking down affirmative action.
I'm just curious, from your own perspective, why is affirmative
action important? Yeah, I think part of it is
about recognizing historical wrongs as well as recognizing
implicit biases. And I'm not saying like the
current models for admissions are good or can't be iterated,
iterated upon, right. Obviously, including our own
advice here, like, yes, we need to like find ways to be more
equitable. I mean in terms of the case
specifically, I've followed more the Harvard ones since that's
where I went. But like in the scheme of things
and I know there's like attention to me saying this as a
Harvard graduate, like in the scheme of things like Harvard
doesn't matter that much, right. Like they educate 2000.
Well 2000 first year students about just under 2000 are
admitted each year. You know so like in the scope of
the country of like all college bound people and globally like
it's a very small amount. And yes it's like over
represented in like the global elite.
But I think the focus really it's like yes, look let's find
ways to be more equitable. But also like at the Community
College and at the state school level, how do we increase
excellence there or how do we increase even open enrollment,
right. Like I've I started college at
Arizona State University my first year as a freshman before
I transferred to Harvard. And back then, you like filled
out your name on a Scantron form and basically if you like,
graduated from high school in Arizona, they let you in, right.
And like, so there's something there too about like both Open
Access, open enrollment, certainly for undergrads and
just seeing if college is right for you being given that chance,
as well as like making that affordable, right.
So you can fail. It's like maybe you try for a
year, but you're not like stuck with 10s of thousands of dollars
of student loan debt to try that out.
Like how do we make it free or low cost enough that people
could try and they can fail. They can see if that makes sense
for them or trade school makes sense for them or or whatever
makes sense for them, right? And so, like, that's where it's
actually important for more people than like, how do we
diversify the elite 2000 kids who get into Harvard every year?
Because. Like that's a drop in the bucket
in the scheme of things. Yeah, and I I think this is
really relevant, just the conversation we had about
failure and this concept of perfectionism, and I feel that.
The tool of affirmative action, it's just one of many different
things, right? Even totally the way we can
institutionalize affirmative action based on race, you can do
it based on a whole variety of different attributes, right?
And often times, especially in both sides, very progressive or
very far right leaning. We have this notion that things
have to be perfect for us to have a forward momentum.
And what I'm? You know, also personally
disappointed by is this inability sometimes to see
beyond things that might not be working 100% in favor of
completely abolishing that. So that, you know, it's almost
like this concept of all or nothing in this instance.
Totally. Yeah.
And I think there's just some bad faith arguments behind it
too, right? And it's like that sort of
perfectionist culture, which I think is also on one of those
lists of like aspects of white supremacy culture.
It's like, OK, like, it's not that most defenders of
affirmative action think it's a perfect system, but it's like,
OK, well, how do we democratically build upon this
and reform it in different situations, right?
And I think I'm still waiting to hear, like, what is the end
point of this right for the people who supported abolishing
affirmative action? If you look at Harvard like it
is already like between 25 and 30% of their entering freshman
class is Asian or Asian American, it's already not
representative of the US general population.
And and maybe that's Okay, right?
But this is where my sort of political philosophy background
comes in too. It's like okay, Well, what is
merit, right? Like we can't just not you have
to like scratch it. What merit means as well in
terms of who creates these tests, who decided what we're
testing on. These things are not set in
stone either. They've evolved with the times.
They also represent social, cultural, political biases and
and what not. Like, you can't just hide behind
this monolithical mythology of merit as this one thing too.
So, like, that's a whole thing we can make a whole podcast
about. The word merit too, I think it's
so interesting because to certain people, different
degrees of accomplishment means so different, right?
Where you you might have somebody coming from a very low
resource community. And for them, getting an average
SAT score is phenomenal, given the complete lack of resources,
complete lack of support. And I also went to high school
with that at the time, had like very little resourcing in
computer science, you know, And for anyone to have any skills in
computer, it's like phenomenal. And I think sometimes we forget
that across the board, not everyone is resourced the same
exact way across the board. And so often times trying to
measure these merits, right, that's almost like a snapshot at
this moment. It is giving you a measurement
of where just people are at currently.
But it doesn't even show you how far people have progressed, how
hard people have worked, where I think a lot of people try to
attribute the scores people get to labor and like people's just
effort, right? But that's what I always say is
I, I especially when we take these test scores and these
snapshots. Into ways that we're just
primarily measuring people. This is just a single snapshot.
And then the last anecdote is especially in running our boot
camp at Q C5 Box design, we measure everyone across many,
many different levels. And this year, we're starting to
include socioeconomic factors into it and as a part of
curating the students who go into our program.
We also recognize what we have to look at some of these
attributes so that we can make a fully inclusive, diverse class.
And often times I think my last note I would add is I have a
hunch that if you put a lot of the people who are pushing for
so many of these decision things to be made actually in the
driver's seats. Creating a classroom, trying to
figure out how to institutionalize diversity and
equity in their own accord. I think they're going to walk
back on so many of these decisions that they've made
themselves. Yeah, I think that's the
challenge, right? For the people who are like, OK,
it's a victory to get rid of affirmative action.
Now it's an equal playing field, right?
It's like, if you actually believe that, then what is your
political commitment to making it actually an equal playing
field downstream? Like, how do you make high
schools across the country more equitable?
How do you make junior high's elementary schools like access
to pre-K event, right. Yeah, because if you, if you
want to pretend that that's equal, then like that that's a
whole different problem. But if you recognize that that's
unequal, then let's make college admissions equal, whatever you
think merit is. But then what is the equal
playing field before that? Absolutely, absolutely.
Well said. And.
We're getting towards the end of our podcast and I just wanted to
ask you, given just all the things that's been happening for
you and also what's happening in the world, the nation around us,
what's next for you? What is next for me?
Because I have this like portfolio career between like
teaching an AIGA and still doing some stuff with Visa part time.
I think coming up in the late summer fall, I've got like
basically like 20% of my time that was previously occupied
opening up. So I am trying to figure out how
to fill that. And so I am kind of keeping my,
I guess, heart and mind open to that at the moment in terms of
what I fill that with. I think 1 hunch I have beyond
like kind of taking on more consulting work or something, is
to do some sort of project that is my own way of making learning
more accessible, whether it's a new podcast or a YouTube thing.
I don't like keep me accountable for this one.
We'll see where we go. You know, I I already teach
students who pay a lot of their families pay a lot or they take
out a lot of student loans to to work with me.
But there's things that I can do that like scale, that are free.
You know, if I make certain parts of my quote UN quote
content, which is a whole word that I I think is kind of
cringy, but like for lack of a better one, like putting that
out there. And obviously there's things
that I do that are valuable that don't scale in terms of what on
one feedback and mentoring and all of that.
But what can I scale and can I make that more available.
I think that's one hunch I have in terms of how I feel that
upcoming 20% time, but also figuring out ways to plug that
financial gap as well as something I'm trying to figure
out. So I think it's balancing those
things out in terms of my next steps.
Yes. I can't wait to see what comes
up. I have no doubt you you'll be
able to figure out something interesting to come of it.
And I just, I just love to and I want to acknowledge.
Just like it's so beautiful to see your story of all these
different things that you've been interested in your life
previously, all kind of coming together, right.
It's like all of these facets of your life in college abroad,
growing up. And starting to culminate into
this beautiful myriad of experiences that not only, you
know, uplifts this deeper in our desire this like to create, but
also helping other people. So just as another community
practitioner, I want to just like, thank you, honor you and
the awesome work that you're doing.
And I think whatever you come to, I think it's going to be
awesome. Well, thanks Steven for the
encouragement and also for giving me the space in the
platform to share today. Yes, yes.
And what is one thing, especially for a listeners, that
you want them to take away with from our conversation?
Think one thing I've already mentioned this, but I think it's
worth highlighting again, is design is ultimately about
power, right? There's craft, there's
aesthetics, there's beauty, all of these things, but it's
ultimately about how you power yourself or.
Your users or communities and thinking in terms of those
ultimate ends as a level kind of zoomed out or beyond just the
kind of craft and the qualities of things, I think that's where
we're going to reach our full potential as a design community.
So I wanted to just highlight that as maybe my last word.
That's tape. And for those listening, how can
they find you? I am at Le Sean pretty much
everywhere on the Internet, whether Instagram, Twitter, if
that's still around, well, this is released and LinkedIn, it's L
EE Sean. So Le like Bruce Lee, Sean like
Sean Connery with no hyphen. My legal name has a hyphen, but
my online persona does not have a hyphen.
And if you want to learn more about our podcast, you can visit
us at yellowglitterpodcast.com. And if you really enjoyed our
conversation, feel free to leave us a note on our website or
leave us a review. We look through all of
everyone's comments and also, if you're subscribed to a
newsletter, feel free to just hit reply.
And if there's any thanks or accolades that you want to
provide leash on. We always forward that over to
our speakers as well. I think the conversation today
has been just so fulfill. It's just so heartwarming.
And I think there's been so many topics that are very pertinent
to today's society and just what a lot of people are
experiencing. And so I thank you so much for
this amazing conversation and hope to have you again soon in
the future. And maybe we can reflect on like
a year from now where? Is he now?
Yeah. Where is he now?
And have we done anything with our world differently?
Well, thanks again, Steven, and thanks for listening everyone.
We've made it all the way to the end.
Yes, thank you and hope everyone can take care and eat some
awesome words with some from the Sean.
And with that, we'll chat with you again later.
Take care. Bye now.
Bye.