I fell in love with design by accident…

It happened at the back of my first grade classroom. I went to an all-girls, Catholic school in the Philippines. The nuns were punitive, and the rules were rigid - even colored hair ties were outlawed. But, I found creative refuge in my business. I personalized stationary with unique designs, sold them to my classmates from behind my desk, and saved up profits for ice cream. Creativity was rebellion - and I thrived in the fight for self expression and joy. 

I then moved to California at 18 to study at Stanford, where I pursued a B.S. in Product Design. I’m currently at Robinhood, designing products and experiences to help democratize finance. Previously, I worked at Nextdoor where I designed products to help improve community health, promote inclusion, and combat loneliness. I am also a KPCB Design Fellow, an Origin Ventures Youth Advisory Board member, and a Stanford Alumni Association board member.

I’m still trying to figure out what design even is, and who I am as a designer. My inner rebel keeps questioning everything. At Stanford, I learned that design should always be in service of the user and their needs - great in ethos, potentially problematic in practice. Users don’t live in vacuums - neither do our designs. I now believe that design should be in service of all community stakeholders, and the environment (which affects us all). Instead of designing for users, I believe in designing for life. Great design goes beyond looking for a solution, and instead analyzes the tradeoffs with all potential decisions, and chooses the path of most good. As Tim Cook put it in his 2019 Stanford commencement speech, “you cannot create a chaos factory and not take responsibility for the chaos.” I feel a lot of responsibility as a designer: privileged enough to get an awesome education, and eager to rebel against existing, systemic problems in our world with my designer spunk.