Experiences
LeaderShape
To be frank, when I signed up for LeaderShape, my initial reason was to get an honors experience out of the way. Sure, I was excited to be a better leader, but I was far more concerned about getting an experience in. Even though I am ashamed to have had that mindset when signing up, I am thankful that I had a desire to sign up for this program. I could never have imagined the impact that LeaderShape had on me.
Leadership to me now is guiding people with integrity. This program increased my confidence, taught be to think big (but still doable), and how to get along with others that have a different personality than mine. But most importantly, LeaderShape expanded my mind to be aware about the opinions and experiences of others different from me. Since coming to Cincinnati, I have been exposed to many different cultures, ideas, and unique experiences that I never would have experienced at home. LeaderShape not only added to that, but exponentially grew my mind about how others’ experiences and how that impacts their opinions. I now feel prepared to carry out my vision and any other idea I have to enact change.
I also am grateful to LeaderShape for the friendships it helped to foster. I knew I would become friends with people after spending six days with them, but this experience brought me so close to people of all backgrounds and views. I will never forget my experience at LeaderShape—especially when my group rewrote Mo Bamba to be about the program for the final day performances.
Artifacts
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Voice Amplifier Redesign
For my self-designed honors experience, I redesigned the standard voice amplifier with industrial design methodology. My mom’s vocal cords are deteriorating, therefore she must use one of these, so I was especially motivated to improve this product for her. I took the redesign from the research phase through ideation, sketching, prototyping, 3D modeling, and rendering. I forced myself to go out of my comfort zone to talk about what I was doing with my friends and coworkers and posted about it on social media. I got very giddy talking about how I was designing to make a difference and I hope sharing this project inspired others to think about what we as a society can do to help others, especially looking for things that may not be the most obvious. I feel as if this was one of the first times I evaluated the needs of others over my personal wishes in the terms of design. It was a very humbling experience to realize that even though I am the expert in my household on the design process and how industrial design plays a role in redoing this product, my mom’s needs are exponentially more important than what I believe. Having this experience has only motivated me to want to design to help others even more. I want to have more of these experiences. I want to keep being humbled by the incredibly strong, smart, and resourceful people I will be designing for, and I want to design to make a difference in this world.
Check it out!
Environmental Futures
This class did an excellent job of making me re-evaluate everything that was happening around me. We dove into subjects deeply, looking at literature and videos that made us think about the world around us and how our planet will fare in the future. The class was completely discussion, paper, and project based which allowed us to focus on learning and creating thought-provoking points instead of memorizing information. Personally, I think this class made me more evaluative. I think that I am able to consider how something is affecting a broader aspect of the world. We learned about how climate change is going to affect not just us, but also those across the globe in a vast variety of economic and environmental situations. I think this class is going to help me with my future at UC and will give me the content, thought processes, and mindset to be able to approach problems with a holistic and empathetic viewpoint, while also being mindful of biases and tampered information. I could have not been happier with the professors, bringing their own completely different expertises to the table to get us to question the world around us from many different lenses.
Below is the final reflection I wrote for this class, focusing on looking at my "About me" from the beginning of the semester and reflecting on how I had changed.
I enjoyed this class a lot more than I thought I would. I was extremely intimidated by the amount of reading we were going to have to do, especially New York 2140, but I had a serious talk with myself, convincing myself that if I am paying money to have to read all of these texts, then I was going to dedicate an appropriate amount of time to read them, understand them, create my own thoughts, and try to actively participate in class discussions. The discussions in this class were thought provoking and engaging and forced me to consider how my ideas were applicable to others and to the conversation. I feel that I learned the most from the class discussions and that the weekly discussions were a perfect way to stew on the conversations of the week to reflect on the new knowledge and insights I had gained about the literature we were reading and the world around me. We don’t have very many written reflection assignments in DAAP, although I think we should have more, so I enjoyed this experience to put to paper my thoughts. I tried pretty hard on these discussion posts, and I believe that through them I improved as a thinker and as a person.
I look back on my “Get to know me” post and I just think about how innocent I was. My favorite podcast is still the same. I am still reading the same book because my reading time was filled by literature for this class. My favorite movie is still Her. My fun fact is still the one I would write today. But, I wrote that “I’m worried about global warming, how that will affect life for everything on earth, and how my industry is playing a role in that.” I wrote that naively, not knowing the true severity of this topic and how it manifests on the earth in so many different ways—from the environmental crises to the humanitarian ones that come from it. Whenever I thought about how my industry affected the environment, I was really only thinking about the plastic in the oceans. Sure, I was conscious of the manufacturing process for products and the greenhouse gasses that result of the entire lifecycle of a product, but plastic in the ocean and water bottles floating in rivers are tangible items that we hold to represent the environmental cause. The concept of saving our planet “bothered” me before this class, but not enough to drastically change my lifestyle, attitudes, or actions. I gave up red meat for a while and I avoided single use plastics and other items as much as I could, and while that is great since one of the ways to make change is through collective action, my motives were very casual and may have almost been a façade to fit in with those around me and those on social media.
I also wrote “I am intrigued by how problems we face now will affect the future, so I am excited to dive into this course.” This statement remains true. I consider myself a problem solver and an innovator and the first steps to solving a problem is to identify, research, and analyze it, explaining my intrigue. But my initial reaction to this was to laugh at myself. I immediately thought back to the Oreskes lecture because the problems that we think we are facing now, whatever they may be, may have been denied for decades. And any problem we face now may never be brought to the light of the general public in order to protect the selfish causes of specific individuals.
All of this brings me to my main reflection after this class and after maturing as a human for another semester: I am a more pessimistic person. I think I realized this on page 603 of New York 2140, when I wrote in my book “I think this is hopeful and not very realistic” over the text when Robinson was describing the specifications of the new world. I’m not sure I have crossed the boundary into being a pessimistic person; I still try to see the best in everyone—but I definitely am skeptical of intentions and motives for nearly everything and am critical of people’s visions of the future. I don’t think this is a bad thing. I think I am just more aware of the world around me—of the suffering, the scandal, the selfishness, the lack of care for others—and therefore, evaluate people’s ideas and how they stack up against the realities of the world. The documentary on the water crisis kickstarted many of these thoughts. I was flabbergasted by the stark contrast between the quality of life and the use of water in the company headquarters and the villages just miles away. I was sitting on my bed unable to fathom how it could be illegal to provide certain communities, but the realize that just a mile away from campus there are people who struggle with situations just as horrifying, and I haven’t done anything to help change that.
I have always been a critical person. I think, and hope, it is going to help make me a great designer, and now I am just applying it to another category of thought. I don’t think this is just to other people’s ideas. I am excited that I am becoming more critical of my own thoughts. I really enjoy the student and professor responses to my discussion board posts and I try to think about how my ideas are influenced or proved incorrect by other points brought up. So, I don’t know if I am more pessimistic, or more critical, or more evaluative, but I suppose it could just be summed up that I am a better thinker.
Before coming into this class, I think the only environmental issues that were on my mind were the tangible ones I could see: the plastic, the piles of trash, the snow levels. But after this class, I think I see more of the wholistic perspective of global crises and how they affect more than just what they appear to touch. I am grateful for this class and I am grateful for the growth I was able to have during the semester. While I don’t yet know how taking this class will influence the trajectory of my life, it has made me think, and hopefully, that will lead to decisions on where to take my life to help the collective of people, other animals, and our earth.
Design and Groupwork
I completed my design and groupwork honors experience by working with an interdisciplinary team to develop a gamified solution addressing food waste on UC’s campus and making a political strategies innovation guide for GE aviation regarding sustainable aviation fuel.
This experience taught me a lot of about working on a team and working with those with very different backgrounds and personality types to me. Part of the beauty of innovation and coming up with something groundbreaking is the combination of unlike ideas. Thoughtfully different group combinations allow for unique ideas to be combined, taken to other industries, and applied to problems in ways that would have never been done if working alone or with people from similar backgrounds. As someone with an intense A-type personality, it can be hard for me to work with others sometimes. This experience helped to increase my patience, become more understanding of others, show them grace, and appreciate those for what they are bringing to the team. I got better at understanding others’ situations and understanding that others don’t get obsessed with challenges and projects like I do (almost to an unhealthy way). I love groupwork and I hope to do it for my career, so I’m glad I got, and will continue to get throughout my schooling, the opportunity to practice working on teams.
The attached artifacts are the final presentation and content to GE for a 6-ish week project on political strategies for sustainable aviation fuel.
The University Innovation Fellows Program at Stanford University’s d.school has been by far the most influential thing I have done at UC. Never have I been challenged like this before, being put with a team where nobody thinks like I do. Our faculty champion is a wizard with group making, perfecting our perfectly different group. It was me, and industrial designer, a biomedical engineer, an English major, and a computer science major. We were all from such different walks of life with very unique takes on solving problems. This team was by far the best team I have ever worked with—everyone was so passionate about the work and contributed so uniquely. I have never grown so much working with others. I learned how to let others shine—when to take the lead and own tasks, and when to rely on the expertise of others to push the work along. We had moments of stress, and moments of success, but I knew that our cohort was going to push through and succeed no matter what—because even if we fail, we were going to learn and end up prevailing in the end.
And now for the impact. I am so proud of what we accomplished. After many, many rounds of prototyping with almost 200 students and faculty from across the university, we were able to launch a 6-week social innovation project where we donated 300 volunteer hours and 6 projects of work to a local non-profit, New Life Furniture Bank. I feel so rewarded for designing and executing such a successful program, especially since we had such lukewarm feedback from our initial concept. The furniture bank was able to take these ideas and present them to a board presentation. They want to continue the relationship to keep getting engagement from UC students. I am so pleased to be able to use all of these concepts we learned and put them to work serving our community. I have such a passion to serve my community, and this is only the start of what I hope to do. I love this work, and I hope to do design research, strategy, and innovation for my career.