It started in 6th grade when my dad handed me a silver iPod Shuffle. Faye Wong was flowing through the earphone wires, and something about that impossibly sleek doohickey just stopped me. I've been chasing that feeling ever since: not frictionless, not optimized, but making the world feel more present, not less.

I came to design through an unexpected route. I wanted to be a journalist, ended up in advertising and digital marketing, and somewhere along the way realized I was really just obsessed with how stories move people. That lens still shapes everything I do: I think about narrative before I think about interfaces.

Outside of design, I'm deeply into reading books on modern Chinese history and gender history, and the novels of Eileen Chang (my forever favorite). Reading history teaches me to zoom out and it reminds me that nothing exists in a vacuum, not people, not products, not the designer making them. That perspective is what keeps me asking harder questions about who design serves and who it leaves out.

What I care most about is staying honest about whose product experience I’m actually protecting. The more seamless and optimized a product becomes, the more it risks becoming a screenshot of an experience rather than the raw experience itself - efficient, frictionless, and strangely thin.

That discomfort pushes me toward the slower work: sitting with user research long enough to find the real person behind the behavior pattern, and using systems thinking to ask why certain people never quite make it into the pattern at all.