A note to myself

Sitting next to the glass window in my room while eating lunch and staring out, a regular position for me when I used to work from home. It was sometime around the mid-summer season, and I was admittedly immersing myself into a bit of a worry session All the "what ifs" creeping in and doing their thing, causing my gut to coil up and placing me in an immovable position. “What are you doing? Look at how great that other person is doing, you will never be able to do that” and on and on. It recently occurred to me that when this occurs, all I need to do is stand on the sidelines and allow the terror feeding frenzy run its course, and the voice will ultimately weary. In the meantime, I could not help but notice the small but encouraging signs of growth appearing on the tree outside of my window. The little buds of vibrant green starting to peak out of the rough brown bark of the tree. How completely vulnerable they looked. They are so little and vulnerable that a wave of wind or a storm could easily knock them off. It seemed to me that they did not appear to be concerned about this possible outcome in their pursuit of progress. They did not stress or worry about whether they were even going to become a leaf at all. They did not worry much about what the bud next to them was doing but rather, grew together with it. They were in this moment, just focused on becoming more. Not overnight, not in just a week, just a bit each day, using whatever nutrients they found had come their way, and little by little, they would eventually unravel to become their fullest selves. Maybe, this is not the best example to give but I am attracted to the simplicity of it. We, humans, like to make things so darn complicated and entangle ourselves into a web of complexities. This year's mantra is "One Thing at a Time."

This brings me to an important learning in life, a strategy that is referred to as “the aggregation of marginal gains,” which was the philosophy of searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything you do. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimating the value of making small improvements on a daily basis.1 Too often we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. The whole idea came from the principal that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into a particular activity and then improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together. I started to abide by this strategy around 2 years ago, during the lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, when I initiated something of my own after my under-graduation studies in Interior and Spatial Design, with the only motive to uplift the creative sector. I still do not know if I can call this my start-up but I definitely call this my brainchild, my safe haven. Meraki, as I named it, is to put a part of your soul, love, or creativity into what you do. To my surprise, when I floated out a social media post about the first workshop, I was planning to host, the response felt like people had been waiting for something to do all this while. The entire process of planning, coordinating and executing a workshop for the first time made me feel like ‘being in the grey’. As days passed by, I started becoming comfortable dealing with all the ambiguity and uncertainty and tried making improvements workshop-by-workshop and soon I mastered it. But achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. That’s the counterintuitive thing about improvement. My initiative began to stagnate in the first four months of its start and I felt the need of adding another feather to the hat. I ventured into the product line industry and launched a small collection for the festive season of crafted handmade products which indeed was a success but, what after the festive season was over? I did not put my workshops at a pause thankfully, but it surely made me feel the need to evolve and gain more experience to grow what I have started. I did a quick mental exercise (which now I know has a name called, back casting) at that very moment about all the things I had to do before I achieve this dream called Meraki. This got me thinking about all the forces at work that we can't always perceive, the innumerable forces that are exponentially larger than us, that regulate our physical world, and that we have only just begun to understand thanks to a rudimentary mix of technology and terrifyingly limited perception ability. And because I am a Gen-Z who’s over-motivated to squeeze every ounce of meaning out of the natural world around me, there are a few concepts at play that instantly present themselves.

I realized soon that it was time to pivot from working for myself to working under a full-fledged firm, preferably in Architecture and Interior Design (because I had done my bachelors in it) to gain more exposure in the field and how a business functions. The word pivot sometimes is used incorrectly as a synonym for change. A pivot is a special kind of change designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the engine of growth.2 I needed to gain more experience in the field of business and how a design firm functions and so I moved on to the next phase of life but kept hosting workshops by Meraki over the weekends as I did not want that to pause that. I started working under a firm in New Delhi, India as an Interior Designer and soon got myself immersed in a pool of perceiving interior spaces. I would not like to emphasize much about what my daily routine used to be, except that I had difficulty in maintaining the perfect work-life balance. I worked from 9:00 AM in the morning to 8:00 sometimes 9:00 PM in the night. During my probation period, I was trained through the entire process of how technical drawings are to be made and what software is used and how the server of the company functions. As months passed by, the concepts became clearer however, the idealistic way of developing a concept and creating a design did not resonate with my ideology of innovation. The concept of working as a team and indulging into ideation and brainstorming sessions was not a part of the process and so the idea on innovation was invisible to me. We live in a world obsessed with results, demanding solutions. Our tendency is to put all emphasis on whether or not the arrow hits the target. If, however, we put that intensity and focus and sincerity into the process, then hitting the bullseye is simply a side effect. I did contemplate over the idea of embarking the next step in life. Working in a full-fledged firm did unravel many steps of the design process and made me more confident of the journey I was on but somehow, it was not the solution to what I was finding to do in the future. Before jumping to any conclusion, I had a whole hearted conversation with my parents to discuss the various prospects of taking the next journey of life to which I knew what their answer would be and it was, “Do what you think is right, we will always be there to support you.”

At first, I was planning to do an MBA so that I get a perspective about the business field. Searching for colleges that support my bachelor’s degree to pursue this line, I chanced upon this course called Design and Management. Unknowingly I started to read about this course and what it holds. And there was the aha! Moment for me. In no time I made up my mind that this is the course that would perfectly amalgamate with what I had been doing so far with the business and management aspects of it.

Studying Strategic Design and Management has been more than just a journey of learning and acquiring knowledge about the field. Through the period of these four months, I have moved away from my comfort zone in search of finding a meaning and to connect the dots. This statement is what I resonate the most with, “You cannot get to courage without rumbling with vulnerability.” (Brown, Brene) It takes a great deal of vulnerability to “embrace the uncomfortable” and put yourself, or your work out there. Many people equate vulnerability with weakness; however, it is said practicing vulnerability takes courage and shows bravery. The ability to collaborate between different notions are so important. The course has majorly been about collaboration and co-creation. Since it is never a good idea to design in a vacuum, bringing a group together for the sole purpose of improving one’s work is essential for any good design practice (the first lesson to be learned from this course). There are certain terms that have got fixated in my mind during these few months that I had been unknowingly practicing in my daily chores but realized that they have a defining word attached to it and is called Design Thinking. Although I feel the reason why it is so over-defined is rooted in a need to help legitimize Design amongst other functions, departments, and domains within Companies. I came to a number of realizations regarding a concept I had always had some trouble grasping, one that has engaged the deepest echelons of our cognitive and imaginative faculties since we could begin to record information: the concept of nothingness (an egoless state of being in which one fully realizes one's own small part in the cosmos). The course has definitely made me comfortable with being in the grey. Thinking about Design has more to do with the process for me rather than the solution itself now. It is all about how you as an individual learn everyday about new ways of tackling situations. I have mostly designed keeping in mind the end product rather than following the process and taking the human-centred approach. Dealing with all the ambiguity at the beginning of the semester and trusting the process throughout the span of these four months helped me derive such a unexpected outcome of the entire project. For instance, starting from mapping out a sub-culture of New York to dealing with human perception was quite intriguing to me. I would like to understand systems thinking better and how might we induce or fit into real world practices. I am sure that these concepts would make sense once we are out there in the world but I am not aware of when to apply what and in what situation would a specific strategy fit into. The only thing that I want to take from this course is to learn how to work as a team, be vulnerable and to look at the world through the lens of a more equitable and empathetic designer.

The roadmap that I have created for myself is to grow Meraki and make it a one stop show for all things creative. For that I would like to hone my skills and knowledge I accumulate through this course and put it to use. I would definitely like to work under a firm that focuses on these aspects of design and how to put these strategies to use to solve ‘wicked problems.’ My aim through this is to create a spectrum of design services that caters to and for the people, and is designed with the people.