How did I become a designer?

In 2014, without any prior experience, through many trials and errors, I made a fully functional electric motor as the final project for my first-year high school physics class. It opened up the world of making for me.

Ever since then, I went on an ongoing route of inventing and creating. In the same year, I established CREAVENTOR, a club where members can design and make cool stuff.

I bought and learned many shop machines and tools myself in order to have the resource to properly make stuff. I watched online tutorials and projects, tried to follow the steps. After getting familiar enough with the basics, I had the courage to start a big project - making a 1500w DRSSTC (Dual resonance Solid State Tesla Coil).

It was a complicated project that took me about a year to finish. Through the project, I learned how to use CAD software and some basics of electrical engineering through the designing and making processes.

My interest was very wide at the time, spanning electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, lasers, woodworking, computers, CNC machining, 3D printing, etc. I was eager to explore different fields and media of creation.

In mid-2015, my sophomore year of high school, I was fortunate to have an internship at CNI (Changchun New Industries Optoelectronics Technology Co., Ltd.) as an optical engineering intern. I stayed there for 2 months in the summer, assembling and repairing solid-state lasers. It was the first time in my life that I witnessed the engineering process being practiced in real life.

By this time, thanks to the support from my family and friends, I had the privilege to work on 50+ big and small projects in the STEM fields, so in late 2016, I graduated from high school and attended the mechanical engineering program at Penn State University.

I had been doing hands-on things for so long that I wasn’t used to reading textbooks and preparing for exams which had been the traditional academic environment.

In my engineering program, I failed calculus, twice.

I always went back to my CREAVENTOR club at my high school during summer and winter break because that was where I found a place to unleash my creativity. I was into cryptocurrency in the summer of 2017, and I built 3 mining machines to earn me some cash using the skills I had.

If you see the commonality here.

I can never stop myself from exploring cool things!

It is very difficult for me to learn with a pen and a textbook. I am not born that way.

I never fully finished reading any textbook in my life and yet I obtained my knowledge through several real-world practices and never gave up trying.

So, instead of trying to fight the environment, I changed my environment.

In the fall of 2017, I started preparing a portfolio for applying to ArtCenter. I worked hard and created 4 projects from the ground up in 3 months. Of which I am proud of this one the most:

At that time, I was probably the only one who came to the school without any background in drawing. I slowly figured out my way of approaching design in the first couple of terms. Through a massive amount of prototyping and iterating, it creates a feedback loop for me to observe, understand, and refine my design through a constant fast-fail and try-again.

My most used pen brand is not Copic, is X-acto.

I not only draw on paper but also draw on my prototypes.

3/21/2020

Now as a designer, I don’t think my job is necessarily to sketch beautiful forms or shapes for a product or to produce wonderful renderings. We believe that we possess one of the most powerful things in the world, to create things out of non-existence that benefit people’s lives and continuously improve them till perfection.

I always say this to myself: If for the rest of my life, I am asked to come up with a perfect glue bottle, I will perfect it to the best of my ability.