As a product designer working in tech for a while now, I always get asked what excites me about design. To answer that question though, I have to travel back in time to visit my past self — a curious third culture kid who suffered from maladaptive daydreaming (to a healthy extent?). For as long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to live out my life in an alternate reality where the world is more advanced and we can literally have that pizza from Back to the Future made in under a minute 😂 🍕 (— I digress, but wouldn’t that be cool?!). It was challenging to face reality when growing up with these dreams and I channeled a lot of that energy into drawing and creating artwork.

However, as I grew older, I realized that I can live in that advanced world — progress might feel slow but incremental progress can compound greatly. I just have to use a healthy dose of my imagination and apply my critical thinking skills to innovate on present problems. With my creative mindset, I ended up specializing in design and also acquired my analytical skills through learning software engineering. Today, I am lucky enough to use my expertise and transform outdated obstacles into efficient solutions for many people. So what excites me about product design is that I’m able to actually make this reality more advanced and remove legacy processes so that this world bridges closer to the one I imagined (for myself and others) — one step at a time.