It’s sort of an accident that I’m in the technology industry. When I was in grade-school, I never did anything technologically related: I didn’t program, I didn’t design websites, I didn’t read articles… I did teach myself the basics of a few Adobe programs, but mainly I used computers like the majority of people my age: I chatted with friends, I wrote documents and I played games. But now I find myself in the center of an industry that frustrates me and feel unlike many of my design colleagues. I’m not interested in the latest tech gadget or a new website or the visual subtleties in the iPhone. I don’t read the blogs online, I don’t make pixel-perfect mocks and I honestly don’t want to have to “check in” on a dozen versions of the same service. I just care about people and want to make things they like to use, especially if it makes them happier.

My mindset is one of people, not products. Only recently in the industry has there been a strong push for user-centric design, with dozens of these new roles emerging at tech companies. Before now, technology products mainly focused on productivity tools which helped us increase our efficiency at getting things done. Now, however, we’re focusing on people and their interactions with each other.

We are experiencing a shift in the mental and social model; the world is becoming more open and connected. We can see this especially in the younger generation, which takes to computers like fish to water, and is extremely comfortable with the openness and ubiquity of social technology. But the vast majority of people find us moving too far, too fast and they can’t keep up. We’ve pushed to build simpler tools over the years to make them easier to understand, but are we getting too simple too soon?

Now I, like many a designer, advocate for simplicity. After all, Apple has built much of its success on designing interfaces that mimic real-world interactions, simple and to the point without too many complications. But on the Internet, we’ve seen a different trend, more along the lines of a single-service front-end. You can do everything you want from one text box on Google. You can post updates to any one of thousands of people from one text box on Facebook and Twitter. Productivity-wise, this is great. But if we’re trying to connect people with each other, I think this is approach is a bit ahead of its time.

Design is about people and spaces, not interfaces. The issue we are facing with social technology today is the lack of defined spaces. Technology and tools may grow leaps and bounds over the years, but we are still biologically limited. We are very context-dependent. In order to understand the world, we build mental schemas of how things work and are put together. We inherently recognize the difference between spaces and their respective functionalities – that’s a big part of how we learn about the world. But with the advent of technology, we’ve been able to conflate the mental model and give users the ability and desire for having everything in one place at their fingertips. Some love it, many don’t.

We have an issue that’s twofold: 1) How do we consume information across multiple social circles from potentially hundreds of people and still be able to give the same attention as we would in a face-to-face conversation, which occurs between only a handful of people at the most? And 2) how do we converse with our various social circles in only one online setting instead of what would otherwise be multiple independent groups at different times?

The answer is not really about simplifying, in fact it’s the opposite. We need to be building in a little more complexity and shape the structure of the products themselves to allow for contextual mental models that accurately affect the real world. The hard part is, the industry seems to be moving in a different direction. I find it pretty hard to design for other designers nowadays since expectations are so high. They’re higher in the industry than they are for the real world. Ask a product designer what the difference between two versions of the iPhone is and you’ll no doubt get a 20-page paper. But ask an average person and you’d barely get a paragraph. The fact is, the tech industry has ramped up considerably in the last decade but the rest of the world hasn’t yet.

With so many options in reach, it can be a bit paralyzing for anyone. The message in the book The Paradox of Choice suggests that people need choices to feel free, yet too many choices will have the reverse effect. It supposes that we actually feel better when we have limitations, so making a decision doesn’t feel as heavy. I’m confident that as technology becomes even more prominent in our day-to-day lives, we will shift to a more carefree, open mindset. But at least for now, let’s be a little cautious on the strides we take, a little sensitive to the consumers’ hesitations and let’s make sure people feel comfortable along the way.

We’re very big on numbers in social technology. From connections on Linkedin to followers on Twitter to friends on Facebook, we’ve been made very aware of quantity. And though it doesn’t really mean much, many of us – myself included – have developed a rather unnatural need to accumulate more and more for the sake of growth.

Society is judgmental, and we’re all aware. Oscar Wilde said that society is a “masked ball, where everyone hides his real character and reveals it by hiding.” If you have too few friends on Facebook, people might think you’re a lonesome loser. Too many and you might be deemed a shallow socialite. But the fact of the matter is that everyone’s actual social networks are small, having around the same number of friends at any given point in time. This is universally true and not surprising – we just have never had to examine it closely until recently when technology started keeping track (there’s actually a specific value of about 150, termed “Dunbar’s Number”). It’s biological: our brains can’t allow us to have deep, meaningful relationships with too many people. It’s just too much information. As it is, our short term memory can only hold an average of only six to seven elements.

But even in that small subset of “real” friends, we hold everyone in a series of concentric circles of increasing size emanating out from the center of extreme intimacy towards an outer cliff of near indifference. And as we move throughout our lives, people move closer or further in orbit with some sticking to the center and many dropping off the outer edge. That’s how it is in the real world and we accept it. But in Internet-land, everyone’s equal. You’re all just “friends” and you always see everything each other has to say. Not only is that inorganic, it’s detrimental – both in privacy and quality.

Let’s take a step back. To be clear, I agree there’s value in maintaining connections to people you meet over the course of your life. After all, to quote A Streetcar Named Desire, a stranger is simply a friend you haven’t met yet. Even so much as a simple interaction with someone can do wonders for building general mutual respect. Perhaps one day we’ll live in a society where everyone is friends with everyone through only a few degrees and thus, we are more likely to treat each other better. Perhaps in the long run, this will allow us not only to glean a better understanding of ourselves but also the world and life itself.

But in the meantime, I worry that the technological focus on quantity has made many people quick to deem others as “friends” before – and perhaps without – ever getting to really know them. It cheapens the relationship and detracts from actual face-to-face interaction which has been the social norm until the last twenty years or so. I’m certainly at fault for adding coworkers as friends before getting to know them. And then, upon getting to know them and seeing the potential for a real friendship, part of me is disappointed that I’ve already added them, almost as if there’s nothing more I can do to grow the friendship.

I’d argue that how many connections you accrue is useful for your own eyes and personal growth but not when showcased publicly to the world. Perhaps if we used these various technology products more authentically, we could stop focusing on what we “show off” to everyone and spend more time engaging with the friends we really know. We’d be less likely to see posts we don’t care about from people with whom we hardly engage and we wouldn’t be as likely to worry about the information we share since our audience would be limited to only the closest of friends. Let’s not try to be something we’re not; let’s just find out and enjoy who we are.

Honestly, if no one knew how many friends or connections you had, would you really be so quick to send those invites? I think we shall find that the more natural and organic we can make social technology, the more useful it will be and the happier we will be for using it.

Design for me is not about how something looks or feels. Although that’s important, it’s purely a manifestation or implementation of some broader concept and core emotional value. Personally, I’ve always concerned myself less with the way, say, a button looks and more on why that button is necessary to begin with. The key to design, I’ve found, is focus. In every good story in *any* medium, every detail works together to maintain focus on one thing – story. The difficulty here is twofold: one, being able to create and understand that story and see all the pieces needed to tell it, and two, ensuring that all those detailed pieces are done perfectly so as not to detract from the story. Most people, when they think about design, think about this latter part – techniques to manifest the concept. And because this second part is difficult as it is, it’s even more difficult when the bigger picture story isn’t clear.

If you look at well-known design/story companies such as Apple and Pixar, you will surely see attention to detail in everything. But all that obsession and pixel-perfect implementation is due to the fact that there’s a central focus and core value driving it all. Pixar makes good movies first, because they ensure they have a great story to tell and second, because they spend massive amounts of energy trying to make the details such that instead of distracting the audience, they actually enhance the story beyond the core concept.

It’s very hard. Very hard. The manifestation of the details of a story takes time, exploration and iteration, not to mention expertise and insight. Never be married to an execution if there’s a shred of doubt in your mind that it might not be the best version. Few things are perfect the first time, if ever. But throughout the process, it’s imperative to maintain the focus on the core story to help you make decisions on what to do. Hence, without that core value and thus, no true focus, your manifestations have no heart.

I find this to be the same paradigm as how we live our lives as people trying to communicate with one another. We each have our own core identity, values, hopes and fears that we want to convey, abide by and on which we want to connect with each other. The problem is that when it comes to the manifestation of our core selves, like designers, all we can do is explore and iterate. And most people aren’t even skilled or insightful at this, so it makes it all even harder.

I really believe that everyone is, at heart, a good person who simply wants to love and be loved. When we hear of people disagreeing and fighting with each other, feeling lost or angry, alone or isolated, arrogant or depressed, I say it’s due to issues with manifestation, since no one really knows how to effectively always come across the way they are, let alone how to forget their own issues and really just try to hear everyone else. It’s this disparity between who you are, how you act and how you’re perceived that I think has lead to much of the unpleasantness we see in the world. Otherwise, it just doesn’t make any sense for someone to be inherently a bad person.

We are often more alone when we are with others than when we are solitary, simply because it’s only in social settings that we must work to explain ourselves and hear others adequately. But if you don’t know yourself well, then you can feel just as alone when you’re by yourself as when you’re with other people. Knowing ourselves is what keeps us focused in our lives on the things that are important to us. With a real focus on our core values, we will be much more likely to understand that the actions we take may not be the best ones and be more introspective on how we can better communicate ourselves.

The problem I’ve found is that few people seem to really know themselves anymore. And if that’s the case, then they have no focus to drive their behavior, which breaks down the whole communication system. It’s hard enough as it is to communicate the same story through various implementations and even harder when no one knows what the story is to begin with. I think that very well may be why we as people tend to be so emotionally tied to good stories – we see through them the possibility that everything can happen the way we want and we identify with the all the obstacles along the way.

These days, we’re so inundated with options, choices, distractions, ways to be entertained and immense freedom to be whoever we want that it’s a lot easier to not know yourself and what you want. And if you’re swimming in a sea of possibilities, it’s easy to lose that focus. It’s the paradox of choice – more options is more paralyzing. Thoreau had said that it’s “not until we are lost that we begin to understand ourselves,” and I think that a lot of people are lost and just don’t realize it.

Trying to find a focus requires an understanding of the big picture, being able to see the world outside yourself, where you fit in and realizing the awesomeness that is humanity. You don’t need to be 100% sure of what you want to do or how you want to act, but you need to have a solid understanding of yourself, what makes you happy and your role in society both among peers and the rest of the world. And that’s pretty much as big picture as you can get.

Part of what helps you find yourself is being alone, contemplating your thoughts and your life and being sensitive to everything outside yourself that you take in. Consider what your friends are telling you, consider what you glean as you go about the world, think about what’s under the surface. Consider what other people are trying to say and realize that they’re in the same boat as you and may not express themselves correctly either. Be sensitive to it all and really take it to heart.

Being certain of yourself is really difficult when everyone around you isn’t. It’s a lot easier to join the crowd and go with the flow than it is to separate yourself and figure it out. I still may not be entirely certain of myself and the world, despite spending most of my time thinking about it. But one thing I am certain of is this: if you do know yourself, are sensitive to the world around you and see the big picture, it’s so much more enriching and meaningful.

When it comes to design, my life, my friends and most things, my refrain has been that the details will work themselves out, which is not at all to say they’re not important. But if we put most of our energy into communally understanding what the big picture is – of a product, movie, each other and our relationship with everything – then the details will fall into place because we all understand the story and can work together to tell it.

If you’ve ever had what has been dubbed as “Mexican Coke,” you’ll probably notice that it tastes a lot better. Why? No, it’s not simply because it’s in a glass bottle vs. a can. It’s because it’s American Coke, minus the corn syrup with real cane sugar instead.

High fructose corn syrup is among the many artificial ingredients that make up much of the food that we consume daily. It’s everywhere, along with trans fat, refined grains and other materials that are so prevalent because they can be easily mass-produced and cost very little.

From food to synthetic fabrics to building materials like particleboard and more, we’ve continually attempted to perfect methods to create artificiality in many mediums for wider distribution and ease of use. And while many of these have had actual positive effects, there seems to be a point at which they stop helping us and start hurting us.

In technology, we’re essentially mass-producing relationships and thoughts through mouse-clicks and keyboards while forgetting that it’s not the real thing. Are we actually closer to each other because of the technology we use, or do we just think we are? While posting something or replying to someone’s post does make the day-to-day routine more interesting and give you something to interact with, does it actually make you more connected to someone? And if not, do you still even care to anymore?

I feel we’ve been led to believe that “connectedness” in today’s society is pretty good, that we’re supposedly working towards some supreme goal of making the world very small and information more available, but that doesn’t mean we understand – or even want to understand – each other better. The fact that people are now walking around glued to their smartphones all the time or that they will interrupt a conversation to text someone is evidence of this.

At times when I feel somewhat lonely or disconnected, I’m often up late online hoping something socially engaging will happen. Then the first thing I want to do when I wake up in the morning is to get online again. It’s fairly okay when it’s just me, but when I’m spending time with close friends, actually reveling in the moment, and I’m still reaching for my phone, eager to check the latest activity online, it bothers me.

Why am I still doing this? Granted, there’s a lot of satisfaction in having these brief encounters with people with whom I don’t have a close relationship. But more importantly, it seems I’ve been conditioned to not want to miss anything “important” or feel left out. These online mediums are my social circles’ way of interfacing and it’s now so ingrained in me that it’s become my social milieu. And even though I know it’s not the realism I want, I still can’t help but want it anyway. “Connectivity is poverty,” says an article from the NYTimes Magazine last year. “The man of leisure savors solitude and intimacy with friends and is surrounded by original things that cannot be copied or corrupted and shot around the globe with a few mouse clicks.”

It’s one thing to try to maintain a balance, but sometimes I think we are neglecting real-life connections for the sake of what we’ve deemed as the best alternative, the high fructose corn syrup of life. It’s not surprising – we’re in an age of extreme instant gratification, where we expect everything to come to us with little to no effort on our part and anything that doesn’t follow this rule simply “doesn’t work well.” Although the artificial ingredients will do the job just fine most of the time, at the end of the day, they’re just plain unhealthy. It doesn’t have to be this way though. It’s fine and great to be able to keep up with your friends’ activities and thoughts but it’s another thing to rely on it as your own means of communication.

The fact is, real connections, real interests and real relationships are harder to come by and take time, dedication, trust and honesty to develop – the last two being harder to discern in the public space that is the internet. Given the economic model of supply and demand, we should all be clamoring for these relationships like we do with diamonds, raspberries and other natural and fairly coveted delicacies. But this takes more effort on our part and that’s just the state of mind in which we seem to be.

Because our social-networking technology is so prevalent day-to-day, millions of people voice their thoughts publicly which greatly dilutes any individual contribution. At this point, I think we’re so used to taking everything on the internet for face value that it’s hard to discriminate between those who really have something to say and those who are writing for the benefit of “pop psychology.” And the worst part is that those people are seemingly rewarded more for being this way. We are on information and commentary overload, a point at which any person, genuine or not, can become a celebrity almost overnight thereby diluting any specialness. How is anyone supposed to hear anyone when there’s so much artificiality standing in the way?

For a pretty long time, I’ve tried to be a very honest and open-minded person whose main goal is to love and be loved by the people I meet. However, the problem with this for me has always been that the majority of people are unable – sometimes unwilling – to do this even if they’ve known you a while. And in my efforts to “speed up” the process, to skip over all the small-talk and surface-level connections and get to the heart of the matter, I’ve often found many people to be extremely hesitant, confused and uncertain.

I’m not discounting what I call “surface-level” interaction. It’s not at all uncommon for us to want to know a few things about someone before we get to know them. It breaks the ice, starts a conversation, leads you down a path. That’s why most interviews, first dates and first meetings always have similar discussions and questions – where’d you grow up, where’d you go to school, what do you like to do, etc. It’s this process that helps us to categorize and define the people we meet so that we may better understand if we’re at all compatible.

But really, just because you’ve connected over a few superficial details and perhaps have a variety of things in common doesn’t necessarily mean that your morals, values or philosophies are aligned – and those are the core issues around which people find a deeper relationship taking hold. As I’ve mentioned before, we all have different ways of expressing ourselves and with society the way it is, it’s so much easier to feel connected to someone for the things you have in common rather than your deeper beliefs, hopes and fears.

Maybe people don’t want to be real with each other anymore. Maybe we like not having to worry about being vulnerable and we just want to enjoy day-to-day interactions around various depthless topics. If that’s the case, then I feel it’s pretty detrimental to a well-functioning society. If we can put in less effort and feel happy with what we get back, then we’ll never want to put in more effort for a real relationship when we won’t see the results as quickly. Perhaps then the very way that social-networking technology is structured – with emphasis on recent activity, life streams and news feeds – can never really allow for anything more in-depth and it’s up to us, individually, to ensure we don’t continue to rely too heavily on it.

In the meantime, what about everyone else, the people who want something more? If not the internet and not real people since they defer to the internet, where do we turn for real, genuine, good old-fashioned relationships? Mexico?

As children, how we learn about love and how we get it shapes our relationship with it for the rest of our lives. Really, until you go to school, your family is the only group of people able to love you and teach you about it. Then when you go to school – hopefully already in a healthy relationship with love – you learn about a different kind of love called friendship. Developing a healthy relationship with this kind of love does wonders for your personal growth and your ability to adapt as you get older.

I, unfortunately, probably did not have a very healthy relationship with love upon entering school. As a product of two parents with incredibly opposing approaches to life yet both equally filled with a lot of love to glean and share, I entered my peer society already unable to connect with anyone who didn’t automatically give me the substantial amount of love I required to feel okay.

For me, it wasn’t just that “kids made fun of me,” because many of us have that growing up and it clearly can’t be that big a deal. It was more the fact that it was so opposite to what my first formative years had been that it hit me especially hard. If a “normal” amount of love wasn’t enough for me, then clearly no love at all was all the more hurtful.

It can be very difficult to enjoy life when you feel you have a lot to say and no way to say it. So as I internalized the effects of the social scene, feeling ever so lonely and unloved, I poured the entirety of my energy into striving to feel heard and forgot to revel in my own uniqueness and enjoy the other parts of life, carefree.

Our experience with love shapes the role we play as adults. If we didn’t feel heard in our youth, we tend to assume the role of the actor – constantly striving for the future, wanting desperately to do something, make something, say something. And if, by some chance, we learned a healthy relationship with love, we are far more likely to be the audience, taking life as it comes and enjoying the day-to-day beauty.

The majority of people seem to fall somewhere between these two extremes, ideally in a good balance between feeling motivated enough to take action when necessary and feeling content enough to relax. It’s no surprise then that people who fall more towards the audience side tend to be happier than everyone else. Rather than feeling unsatisfied with life’s story, they enjoy the good things. Contrarily, I, like other actors, think I can’t relax until I feel life’s story is progressing “correctly” and thus am continually working to try to mold it.

I’ve never been a patient person. When things don’t feel right, I’m continually exceedingly frustrated. And things never feel 100% right, ever. And that’s because, even when everything seems like it should be perfect, feeling heard is only part of it.

The actor is inherently lonely. An audience, inherently not.
As an actor, your happiness is placed in the hands of others. You can do whatever you want to communicate yourself and feel heard but even if you’re successful, you’re still just a guy on a stage preaching to a group. That’s not really love; we just think it is.

You’re really loved for how you love. For me, feeling connected to people on fundamental, emotional levels means more to me than having a bunch of stuff in common. It means trust, openness, honesty. It allows us to be real. We can put ourselves out there and let others decide our merit or we can learn to be content in our own mindset and act as our own audience. If we can focus on this, then we can more easily see that although everyone does things differently, sees things differently and has different interests, perceptions, values and morals, at the end of the day, all we really want is just to love and be loved.

In what I like to call my “spectrum of subjectivity,” I believe people fall on a line between being very objective-minded and being very subjective-minded. Those on the objective side tend to be more left-brained, mathematical and logical in their thinking and those on the other end are more right-brained, creative and emotional. I think most of us fall somewhere between the two extremes, making the majority of us able to communicate in more ways than one. But in the cases where people fall at one of the extremes, I suggest that their ability to communicate decreases in breadth and increases in depth. If you look at the greatest musicians, writers and artists over the centuries, you see a pattern whereby their brilliance and depth of human understanding is evidenced in their work, yet their interpersonal face-to-face relationships suffer. The same is true for the greatest scientists and mathematicians. The latter made strides in understanding how we work; the former in how we feel. If you move along the line to further extremes, I think there’s a threshold whereby you lose the ability to communicate entirely, in any medium, and you just live inside your head, consumed by your own thoughts. Fortunately or unfortunately, we have pills for that now.

Design falls in a tricky mix of these two extremes. We must use logical, objective reasoning to affect essentially unpredictable and emotional beings. It seems almost paradoxical. Yet we’ve continually seen timeless and effective design in a multitude of mediums for centuries that has affected humanity on deep levels, perhaps illustrating that while we’re all very different emotionally, there are fundamental truths we all share. And that’s pretty interesting, especially to someone like me who’s always felt so distant from everyone else.

I talk a lot about my childhood and my relationship with my parents but in no way do I mean to imply that it wasn’t loving. In fact, I’d venture to say I had too much of it growing up which didn’t prepare me for the lack that exists in the real world. I was raised by people in touch with their emotions and express them freely and then cast into a society of peers who deemed it uncool to do just that.

I love being expressive, doing things for my friends, hosting parties, building social circles and “feeling the love.” To many, it seems out of place, so they try to label it with something more familiar to them (and we all love meeting expectations, right?). I’ve continually found it difficult for people who know me to just accept that maybe there is no technical term for the way I am – I just love love.

It’s nice to feel taken care of, considered, respected, trusted. I think we all really want that at a core level but we cover up over time as we find that the world doesn’t always give us what we want. It’s self-defense, really. Otherwise I see no reason why anyone would not naturally be nice, loving or caring about people they meet. The fact of the matter is, I think we’re a bit starved for it in society – some more than others, of course. But we don’t need much – just little things here and there. They make us feel better put together than individually. It’s the Gestalt theory of psychology – the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

This is key to a brand’s success. As long as they’ve existed, companies have tried to “keep the customer in mind” saying things like “the customer is always right”, “we’re here for you”, “you’re special”, “you’re our priority” etc. But if we don’t see it in the little things, it isn’t really true. When you actually look at what Virgin America, for example, does with their brand, you can see why they’re so successful to the point that people are actually willing to pay more for the experience. Every point along your interaction with them, from when you buy your ticket to when you arrive at your destination, is carefully branded to make you feel taken care of. In general, people are willing to pay hundreds of dollars more to sit in first class for what essentially costs the airline nothing – a meal, a movie, a bigger seat, a pillow. The same is true for Apple, in which every detail is carefully designed and obsessed about. They care and we care, so we pay more.

It’s always seemed silly to me that we tend to think of designers as people who “make things look pretty.” The way I look at it, we’re not that at all. There’s a huge difference between those with the technical skillset to render a nice-looking button and those who observe the world and make inferences on what makes us tick, thereby defining the reason for needing such a button in the first place. The problem is that a lot of designers make things based on how they feel which, though emotional in practice, is internally-oriented and totally subjective. Just because they like a color doesn’t mean it actually speaks to the rest of the world. I think really effective designers are inherently psychologists who manifest their theories in objective principles that guide the design.

As a designer, it’s not about you. I’ve learned the hard way, having desperately tried for years to understand and build relationships with my peers and being continually told that what I think doesn’t matter – it’s about what everyone else expects.

We’re starry-eyed with the idea of “changing the world” and that really means affecting humanity – a never-ending quest. Constantly on my mind and something that can, at times, consume me, I do it out of wanting love and wanting to give it. I wish I could break down these walls that people put up to prevent them from being emotional and really connected. But until that happens, I’ll just continue to help make things that try to nudge us closer.

We as humans do well with predictability. Subconsciously I think it almost reassures us that we’re learning, growing and have developed good heuristics about the world and how it works. When something unexpected happens, depending on the magnitude and context, it can be quite confusing. We want to plan ahead. If it’s raining, you take an umbrella. If you pay your bills on time, you keep your electricity. If you’re gonna be late, you call someone (well, some of you).

Similarly, growing up I didn’t expect people would behave badly or turn me down for a date or make fun of something about me of which I wasn’t aware. But they did and to me, it seemed so out of place that I adjusted my psyche to come to expect such things to happen to me.

Developing stories is the only way for me to make sense of the world and feel comfortable within it. If I can predict what should happen, then anything bad that does occur suddenly doesn’t feel so bad. Rather, it’s as though it’s all part of some bigger plan and will make sense later.

I know a lot of people who don’t overanalyze and who just “go with the flow.” But my parents never raised me as someone to do that and take life as it comes. Instead, they taught me to be overly-cautious, plan ahead, weigh the options and be careful. This, of course, isn’t a bad thing entirely, but when it’s coupled with also feeling unaccepted socially, you actually forget how to be a kid, happy, carefree and curious. As a result, I’ve always had a hard time being relaxed about things. I plan out in my mind all the possible scenarios in which something goes wrong or right and then apply the stories to my life, making sure that whatever does happen fits into the story I’ve constructed. And let me tell you, it’s amazing how many ways something can happen that doesn’t meet an expectation.

If I like a girl, I’ll probably try to figure out all the meanings behind her actions, guess what she’s thinking based on what has happened, take into consideration her personal background to educate me on my perceptions and predictions, weigh in the various events in her current life that might affect her and then think about what I’ve done that might have influenced her to say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Don’t think I’m crazy – it’s just how my mind works now. Believe me – it’s not fun. For years my friends have told me not to worry so much about these things, but how can I not? It’s built in.

Growing up, conversations with my dad would follow this pattern: “Did you brush your teeth? Take a shower? Put out your clothes for the next day? Did you floss? Who’s the friend you’re visiting? Does he have a last name? Are his parents home? What’s his phone number? You’re wearing *that*? You need to eat more than that. It might rain later so it’s probably not a good idea to go out tonight. What are you wearing for your first day of work? Those shoes? You should buy some new shoes. Let me buy you some new shoes.”

To this day, my dad can’t believe my manager wears a T-shirt and jeans to work. “You should dress nicer,” he says. And those of you who know me well, know that I do dress up… though hard to say if it’s because I really want to.

On the other end of the spectrum, conversations with my mom were more analytical and personal in practice: “What did she say? Well did she say this? That’s odd, I wonder if she meant this. Oh he probably thought you were this so he did that. Have you considered trying this? Maybe if you did that, this would happen. Well she’s probably got issues. Did you say something? Oh you shouldn’t have said that.”

And, lest we forget, I’ve lived with my parents for most of my life until really just six years ago.

Given this, I think it’s understandable why I’ve grown up having been cautious and analytical so nothing could possibly go awry. God forbid I didn’t plan ahead. This was coupled with a need for social acceptance which in turn gave an expectation of who I *should* be. Were I to actually be unique and “myself,” then I really wouldn’t blend in with the expectations of my peers and feel awkward (see previous story).

I will say, however, that while this mindset doesn’t necessarily suit the social life (as you really can’t plan ahead with people since emotions are unpredictable), it does have a lot of relevance to design (surprise?). Not everyone is going to understand something you make, but given a fundamental understanding of psychological and biological principles that we all share – and thinking about every possible use case and scenario in which a task could be completed – you can develop products for the majority of users that meet their expectation.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to design with expectation in mind – that’s why I’m such a proponent for simplicity and consistency. If you make something totally unique, you run the risk of confusion. Were you to first meet the expectation and then *exceed* it, then you’d be all set. When I meet new people I try to build a level of familiarity in our conversations so we instantly feel comfortable and have some connections on things. It’s only after people get to know me that they become aware of my quirks and nuances in my personality that make me unique. Hopefully they’ll like me enough to remain my friend. And that’s the way I think design should be. Familiar enough to learn, unique enough to last.

Let’s never underestimate the power of meeting expectation. In a world of infinite possibilities – and where infinite things can go wrong – it’s amazing just to have a button that does what you expect placed where you expect it.

When I was young, I loved engaging in the arts, whether it was singing or dancing or drawing or acting or playing music or dressing up. I did it all. And it was fun. But when I entered school, it was made very clear to me by every other child that I was different. And, as such, I became a subject of ridicule. I was terribly confused. I thought my sensitivity, care and attention to detail would make me naturally accepted by my peers, but instead I seemed very out of place.

They wanted to rough-house. I wanted to draw.

They wanted to kill insects. I wanted to save them.

They wanted to make fun of the girls. I wanted to kiss them.

It was lonely, and I didn’t want to be lonely. Having had such a strong passion for all things and a desire to connect with other people, being lonely is probably the worst thing I could have had growing up. Quite a dilemma… you want to be true to the values that make you who you are, but you also want to be accepted and liked.

People suggested that I stop caring what other kids thought and just be myself. But they weren’t there with me in school when I had to constantly sit alone, when I was ridiculed to tears or when my entire fifth grade class sang the lyrics to “We are the Champions” and replaced the phrase, “No time for losers,” with, “No time for Eric.” Be myself? I think not.

It became apparent to me pretty early on that I had to choose between being me and being accepted. I chose the latter and tried every which way I could to fit in: changing how I thought, what I cared about, how I dressed, how I acted. To me, there seemed to be no other option. Lucky for me, I guess, I was able to translate my inner voice to other mediums, such as art and doing well at school. Granted, it still set me apart from other people, but there was no way I was going to purposely do poorly in school just to fit in … it was the only part of me I retained. Kids were drawn to characteristics I just didn’t have, so I was left to change everything else about me.

I begged my parents for a new box of crayons to bring to class so kids would want to draw with me, even though I always preferred colored pencils. It backfired; suddenly kids were interested in aromatic markers instead.

I needed my dad to come in and give a talk about taking care of your teeth so I could help out with the demonstration and feel special. It backfired; he didn’t let me help out.

I got myself a laptop in eighth grade to take notes in science class so that kids would think I was cool for having it. It backfired; I became too much of a nerd.

I had to get a pretend earring so I could seem as cool as my friend who had a real one and never seemed to get teased. It backfired; the kids said it made me look gay.

I had to buy the popular clothes from Abercrombie so I could at least start looking like everyone else. It backfired; none of the clothes fit me.

I had to force myself to climb the unknotted rope in gym class like everyone else. It backfired; I tired quickly and then couldn’t even climb the easier, knotted rope.

I had to make fun of other kids to avoid getting ridiculed myself. It backfired; I got detention and ridicule anyway.

I had to cheat on test so I could ensure I’d still get good grades. It backfired; somebody told the teacher.

I tried to make fun of myself and beat the other kids to it. It backfired;  I just gave them better material.

I tried helping my classmates out during our fourth grade group Scrabble sessions by scoring big words, but that backfired because I was taking the game too seriously.

I tried getting involved in intramural basketball. But that backfired too; I wasn’t very good and thus, I was teased.

The only thing I really had going for me – in my mind – was that I was doing well in school and was able to make things that people liked. So I clung to that as my identity and safe haven. When I felt bad about myself for anything, I told myself I didn’t have to care about what people said because, for example, I did better on a math test or I was friends with the teacher or my class project got the highest grade. It gave me a sense of self worth which I was severely lacking. To add to my frustration, I often felt unable to express myself honestly and kids often misinterpreted what I meant and twisted it so I still looked like a bad guy.

I feel like I’ve been so concerned with how other people see me for so long that I’ve blurred the lines between what I do for me and what I do for other people. And this, of course, is bad practice in design.  A lot of designers, including myself, have advocated the sentiment that you shouldn’t let your users define your brand or your product. That’s not to say, of course, that you shouldn’t consider their opinions and feedback and weigh it into your decision-making. But at the end of the day, you really have to create your own vision and be confident in it. This is a value I know is central to companies like Apple and Facebook.

You can’t design for everyone. I should know – there’s just no way to make everyone happy. If you’re not confident in yourself and you try diluting your identity to incorporate everyone else’s feedback, you end up with something where no one’s happy – and, in the design world, products which are overly complicated, lack focus and ease of use, and are just unpopular. This is something I’ve found from my experience at Microsoft. Despite incredible talent and success, they seem to have lost their way. When you try to satisfy every constraint and spend so much time appeasing other people, you become something you’re not and it’s a terribly sad situation when you realize it (and even more sad if you don’t).

Sometimes I don’t even know if what I feel or think is actually me or if it’s just the result of years of adapting. I like to think I’ve tried hard to be true to my values and beliefs, but there’s always some doubt in my mind about my motivations and reasoning. Even now that I’m a lot older and have had a lot of experience at a lot of places, I’m still not entirely confident. And it’s hard being yourself when you don’t even know who you are yet.

As a child, I took great interest in putting things together, building structures and figuring out how things worked. I was very akin to seeing shapes in everything and describing complex objects as made up of smaller, more recognizable components. But more importantly, I also tended to see or be sensitive to faces in objects and would instantly feel connections that made me very sympathetic and concerned for their well-being. As a result, I often saw plush toys or porcelain figures I had to have and ended up collecting hundreds of them over the years. I grew really attached to characters in stories and movies. I cried when I met Cinderella at Disney World because, I said, “they ruined your dress!” I saved flies and ants that I found in our house. I held little funerals for mice that my cats brought in. I couldn’t throw away so much as a piece of paper with a drawing of an animal on it without feeling guilty. I wouldn’t eat chocolate animals because I saw them as real animals and felt bad. I would even hold onto little pink erasers if they resembled an animal. The only way my parents ever got me to finish items of food was by telling me that if I didn’t eat the last bit, it would be lonely.

Aside from my mathematical, spatially-oriented mind which I’m sure most designers had as kids, my dedication was really more to relationships, feelings and personification. I built up a miniature town of my little animal figurines, complete with houses, trees, cars, handwritten menus at restaurants and little pieces of food I made out of clay. And with the setup continually growing from just a shelf in my room at age six to an entire room in our house by the end of middle school, I developed deep and complex stories between all the animals and would write at length and in detail about them. It was common knowledge across my family that someone could so much as rotate one of the pieces and I would be able to figure out which one it was.

I couldn’t explain it at the time, but everything had to be “a certain way.” It wasn’t until I started school, however, that this mindset really became so important to me on a personal level.

Kids have an amazing ability to make fun of anything they can. For me, it was my short height, thin build, weird clothes, bushy hair, artistic flair, lack of physical strength, inability to play sports, sensitivity, being jewish and having good grades. To add to my lament, I also loved girls way earlier than most kids and was continually frustrated that none of them liked me back. The kids made fun of that too, of course. To this day, the years of ridicule and need for acceptance have instilled so much neuroticism in me that I’m affected in some way in everything I think and do.

Unable to feel comfortable showing people “the real me,” I found more superficial ways to get people to like me: I told jokes, I performed magic tricks, I played piano, I drew pictures – anything I could do that would get people to like me without forming a “real” connection. Granted, this did instill a somewhat natural inclination to be a performer, but it masked what otherwise would have been an ability to connect with people on a more genuine level all those years.

Additionally, my parents – who finally got divorced when I was nine – were not your typical parents. My mom never made friends with “soccer moms” because she was probably too liberal-minded and she was starting a company in our basement. My dad never bonded with any other parents because he’s sensitive, hates sports and has an idealistic image of how the world should work. Both were overprotective and instilled their values – and fears – in me from a young age. As such, I grew up rather sheltered, cautious and sensitive yet ambitious, creative and an independent-thinker.

Between the social scene at school and the odd dynamic at home, the only place I really felt safe and at peace was among my stuffed animals and miniature town, with my stories and relationships and characters. I often begged my mom not to make me go to school so that I didn’t have to interact with any of the kids. But then something happened in preschool that struck a major chord in me. I liked to draw and I found that the other kids were drawn to my ability. They’d ask me to draw them pictures and I, so eager for acceptance, would of course consent. Soon I realized that despite whatever mean comments the kids could think up to say to me, they couldn’t touch my art. And that gave me something that I desperately needed – an identity.

As the school years progressed, the teasing got worse, but I got more involved in my artwork. Kids might have said things about my physique, but no one could really penetrate my made-up world in my drawings. If anything, they tried to copy them. By the end of elementary school, I had started drawing comic strips with a variety of animal characters and relationships. I considered these cartoons my real friends and would draw them constantly throughout the school day, especially when I felt alone. A project about careers I found from seventh grade reads, “I want to be a cartoonist so people will like me for my drawings.”

In addition to the social benefit, I added artistic flair to my homework assignments and it made them stand out from the rest. Without many friends, I had time to do every project when it was assigned and spent most of my time perfecting visual elements, picking out certain fonts, colors, lines, images, etc. Even little things such as math problem sets from sixth grade would be carefully written out (or rewritten, if my first version wasn’t pretty enough) and notated. By high school, I became known as the kid who always excelled at his work and went that extra mile with assignments to make them extra polished and [perhaps unnecessarily] detailed. It wasn’t because I really wanted to – rather, I was just using it as a medium to express the self I otherwise wasn’t able to. As designing became more important to my personal success, I also got involved in extracurriculars that extended my reach, allowing me to redesign and edit our school’s newspaper and literary magazine and create flyers and print material for other clubs and events.

And so, this personal obsession of mine to create, to make things a certain way, to put things in order, became almost paradoxically also a way for me to define myself and connect with people I seemed otherwise unable to. Praise for my work was taken personally as praise for me. In my mind, people may not have liked me for whatever reason, but they could connect with me through what I made, and that was just as good. It gave me extreme comfort to feel as though I did have some value to society and that following my own set of rules made everything more bearable.

This makes sense, of course. Feeling rather helpless and confused in the real relationships in my life, the only thing I really could control was my work. And, with so many different people seemingly telling me who I was and how I was supposed to act, it was imperative for my own sanity that I maintained some semblance of having an identity and I obsessed over developing one and promoting it. Fortunately, the importance of identity – of brand – is at the root of design. I had a concept and feeling that drove my actions and every decision I made in how I presented myself. For me, it was making order out of chaos. I created rules and frameworks that made sense of things, since so much in my life didn’t. I spent copious amounts of time analyzing people’s behavior and thoughts with strict objectivity, trying to figure out almost mathematical reasons why they did the things they did, so I could then change my actions and expectations to fit the paradigm. It was all I had to make myself feel comfortable with things. Otherwise, it would all be too chaotic.

As I’ve formalized my design expertise, learned techniques and about guiding principles and worked on all sorts of projects big and small – print layouts, architecture, graphic design, 3D models, animation, video production, web development, iPhone apps and much more – one thing has remained the same: an attention and true dedication to a story and a core value and vision for a design. I’ve found through my experience that most companies and projects often lack this central, most important component and without a driving force, a framework or a concept, it’s all too easy to end up with something sub-par. Design requires discipline and dedication.

As technology has grown more ubiquitous, we’ve had the ability to affect people’s daily lives and their relationships and I’ve found these challenges to be especially close to my heart. Although my specific skill-set, however diverse, may not be as perfected as others, I see the big picture and understand the need for a vision and the steps to create one and follow it. My passion is who I am, and this mindset has been so crucial to my own personal happiness that it’s become essential in my day-to-day job. Without it, everything easily feels chaotic again and I am deeply unsettled in my own well-being. What can I say – loving design is one thing, but another thing entirely is living it.