Lately I’ve been wrestling with a fascinating challenge: distilling my work into a single vision or statement. I’ve consulted with friends, my partner, my parents, and close advisors. It’s been a period of intense introspection and I imagine this intense introspection will continue to be a part of my life as I grow older, and hopefully a bit wiser.
I recently read Elle Luna’s at the Crossroads of Should and Must, as well as Parker J. Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak and Keith Yamashita’s essay on “Defining your Purpose” in Make your Mark. These writings focus less on ‘finding your purpose’, more on distilling it, and have had a profound impact on my effort to better understand the why behind the what of my creative path.
SYNTHESIZING MY WORK TO DATE
Liz Sander’s writes about a generative design research concept called the Path of Expression. It expresses the journey that the research participants she works with go through to unlock visions of their desired futures leveraging their ability to observe their present experience, and then move into articulating their past experiences.
Image courtesy of Elizabeth Sanders’ Convivial Toolbox.
In my effort to be able to articulate my purpose, I have been drawing on some of the practices she outlines in her book Convivial Toolbox to better understand my motivations for taking on the projects that I have worked on in the past, and hopefully chart a direction for my future.
I threw the projects I’m most proud of on post its organizing them by “What”, “How” and “Why” and began looking for themes.
A cursory glance would suggest a lot of my work has focused on supporting the creative class and enhancing creativity.
In my Human Factors class this week we began discussing designing for the elderly and learning about the constraints that emerge as people move into their elder years. I remember having a visceral response to the idea of designing for the elderly, one that made me kind of recoil. As I dug deeper into that reaction, I realized it was one of fear. For young adults and those who are at the early stages of their lives, there is already a bit of uncertainty and fear with just starting a career, so to compound that fear with the fear of aging, I understand why the elderly are so frequently ignored when young designers are designing new technology.
On a run this morning I had an interesting moment of inspiration. In that same class we discussed the power of the Baby Boomers as a generation and how they’ve redefined conceptions of what it means to be young, middle aged, and now elderly.
ne of my assumptions is that the elderly are a marginalized population, and the glorification of youth in the mainstream media contributes to this marginalization.
The mischevious, playful part of my soul led me to think of concepts that would disrupt perceptions that lead to the marginalization of the elderly. And then it hit me. All of my work to date has been about disrupting perceptions.
Which prompted me to ask why? Why is disrupting stereotypical perceptions about different socioeconomic groups so inspiring me to me.
I think it initially stems from growing up half Indian, half Italian in Houston Texas. I remember stories my racially ambiguous younger siblings would share about being told that our fair skinned Sicilian mother was not our mother because they were ‘brown’ and she was ‘white.’ As the eldest brother I remember feeling fired up and protective of my siblings. Processing these experiences was difficult for me at the wise age of ten, so I could only imagine how confusing some of these experiences could be for them.
I remember moments when my friends in the lunch line would express their stereotypical understandings of my cultural cuisine, behavior, and traditions. In the moment I felt compelled to help them understand these elements of my identity. Compelled to not just help them understand, but appreciate these cultural artifacts, from lasagna to potato curry, from exciting battles with monsters in comics about the Hindu deity Krishna, to merits of Arancini from Arthur Avenue.
I also remember discussions in my early twenties with my parent’s friends and older members of my family. They asserted that the professional path I was on would lead to inevitable failure, and advocated I explore more accessible professions in business or medicine. I realize now that they were just unfamiliar or unable to assist me on my path to producing independent cinema, and their own fears were being projected on to me and my creative colleagues.
My goal then was not about defending a cultural heritage or the value of creativity, but expanding these perceptions about who I was, where I was from, and what I thought the world could be; to ultimately bring out a better version of them, one that I thought was a more empathic version of themselves.
That desire to bring out people’s best selves has lead me to bring out my best self, to accomplish things I didn’t think were possible, and to offer creative opportunities I never imagined.
Uncovering bias and finding ways to disrupt them has pushed me to address my own biases and cultivate my own ability to empathize. I’m realizing that when I create work that helps others address their own biases, I’m not only bring out their best selves but my own best self as well.
