I’m writing this with a reference to C.G. Jung’s concept of collective unconscious. The collective unconscious is — to put it in plain English — the archetypal way we humans behave. This influences how we go through archetypal events such as birth, relationship, mating, illness, death, etc. When a world event is ongoing, we could see how the collective unconscious is recognized worldwide. In order to grow as an individual, we need to consciously derive meaning from the collective behavior and make conscious efforts to not to be lost in the push and pull of the collective energy.

The very…

In 2018 I signed up for Medium membership. Since then, I received extra (one or two) weekly emails on what to read. There’s really a lot happening on Medium and despite some interesting stories I still wasted a lot of time to reach the right pool of curated stories. In the end, I appreciated more of “from your network” and “related stories” than the curated stories from the editors. Many of them are written by authors who don’t need to get promoted anyway.

On the bright side, I could access stories with asterisk (*) sign that were previously inaccessible to…

When I was 4 years old, I learned the word “God” in two languages. One language from my country of birth, and another one from far away. Half of my extended family inherited the language from their ancestors who came to my country of birth centuries ago.

Immediately upon learning the words, I saw two people in my pre-logical mind, a man and a woman, standing tall among the stars and galaxies. I associated one word for the man and another for the woman.

The man was holding the earth, and the woman was holding a book. Earth can be…

Mount Lawu, Java island. Altitude: 3150 meters (10335 feet).

The mountain stood 3265 meters (10712 feet) high. I took a half-day climb from a high land on Java, Indonesia. Just before the summit, there’s a camp area where we could either set up our own tent or get inside one of the three big tents owned by the food sellers (two of them are only open in weekends, one of them is open year round — the owner lives there).

I shared a big tent with a food seller, her family, a group of men, and my small group of three. The group of men were roughly in their…

In a previous post, I have discussed why strategy is the most forgotten part of design. In this article, let’s talk about strategy. It could be a profession or a title/role in an organization a.k.a. Design Strategist, but any designers need strategic skills. Therefore, although I like to use the term Design Strategy, I’d rather call the general individuals Strategic Designers.

1. What Design Strategy is Not

Design Strategy is not Design Management

Design Management is about managing a design project or a design team or both. Their strength is in the organization design and their responsibility is in the operations of design. …

I was born to readily love anyone.

What prevents me from loving is fear. The fear can come from myself or other people.

My best moments are when I get rid of my fear and the only fears available between me and others are theirs.

People translate deep-seated fears into many endeavors, from gaslighting, politics, to public bullying. I am always amazed of how capable humans are in translating their fears into so-called intelligent attitude and behavior. I cannot understand how they do that without being aware of the pain it causes.

I am here in this world to readily…

America has people of all colors and sizes from all over the world as its citizens. That way, they forgot that there’s such a thing as American culture. When we say culture, it’s not the just the ancient traditions brought by each multiple ancestors like German, Ghanaian, Indian, Irish, Korean, Nigerian, etc. Culture is also about what the society has evolved into. It’s the daily practices, attitude and perception about each other as a human as well as a nation, connected to geographical situations like Mid West, Southern, New Yorker, Southern Californian, etc.

Such culture is the biggest filter Americans…

Earlier I wrote about three roles of design: research, strategy, craft. In this article, I’m addressing research for a particular industry: digital service industry or #DesignInTech. Within the community, there are many practical guidelines about iteratively crafting a digital prototype. We see so many tools built to support such activities, but we don’t see enough practical guidelines about iterative research to obtain insights.

When it comes to HCI or social science graduates, they might have learned many research methods that allow them to practice solving different types of problems , but most tech companies are interested in solving only problems…