Ben Kim

I really resonated with Jessica Aceti’s story. Like some others on this earth, I am a perpetual job hopper. I have worked as a people manager, a teacher, a waiter, barista, a union organizer, and even most recently as a DJ. And those are just my paid jobs. I have so many more interests that I have never been paid for. I am an avid classical pianist. I am a crochet artist. I am a mathematician and philosopher. A daily writer. A cook, a dancer, and a performer. I am a programmer, a therapist, and a tutor. A youtuber, a cyclist, and a climber. Despite my anxieties about not having a single life’s passion into which I can pour all my efforts and make a living, I do love each of these parts of me, for each of these roles represents the rich activities which will be filling my life. If there is any constant, it’s that there is no constant.

I used to be obsessed with a common adage said to people like me. The adage is the advice that “given enough time, all of your experiences will cohere into an amazing job that you just don’t even know yet”. I feel like I’ve been waiting for that moment my whole life. I fantasize about it – what it will feel like to finally be over the hurdle and know that all of the meandering and vacillating will have not been for nothing. They used to tell me when I was young, that in the future, there would be no more need for specialization, and that rather, the job market of the 21st century would require simply the skill of being able to learn whatever you need to adapt. I’m still holding onto this belief, even though it hasn’t worked out personally for me yet.

I think it will though. I have to have faith, because there’s no other option. This is just the way I am. Saying yes to things is how I’ve gotten where I am today. The last job I had that lasted for a long time, 3 years, was during the pandemic, when it was too scary to leave. Even though I had long blown past the point in that job when I felt like I was able to tolerate the boredom, I stayed so that I could feed myself during a global time of uncertainty. But it was the yes, the leap of faith, that drew me out of it and onto to the path to where I am now, a year later. It was actually a simple random act of the universe. I was in New York, and I saw an ad for a graphic design bootcamp on the train. I’d later find out that there was no way I could pay 30 grand to move to New York and bootcamp it up for 3 months, but at the time it was like I was being given a subliminal message from God, who asked: “Do you want to try this?” And that sparked the process of eventually compiling a portfolio to apply to SCCA.

I’m here now, and it’s amazing to see what a simple yes can do. You can simply not know where you’ll be in the future, so there’s no point in worrying about it. The best you can do is to take one step forward, crossing the river one stone at a time. At least, that’s a new adage I’ll live by.

I was really fascinated by the talk that Joe Hallock and his colleagues from Microsoft gave about the UX/Product Design field. I had a little bit of knowledge about product design before coming to SCCA, but now that we are in the swing of things with our classes, on top of this most recent guest speaker, I feel like I’m starting to really get a sense of what it actually is, and consequently my desires around what subdomain of design I want to land in may be gravitating towards it.

Of course, it’s still to early to know for sure. But I think about the Japanese concept of Ikigai in the discovery process. The relevant part of the concept for me is the thinking around the overlap between that which I am good at and that which I enjoy. Both of these dimensions are something that I am still constantly in the process of uncovering. My 20s have been a minefield of careers that I fled from, so I’m hoping that this time around, I will be able to chart my initial course as a designer with more wisdom.

I used the diagram that Joe explained to us to brainstorm some of the possible design fields I could work in. The yellow notes on the chart below represent the fields that I already had an interest in before this program started. The blue notes represent the fields that I am curious to know more about, that I filled in just on my own, after starting this exercise.

Figma Link for the above diagram

Doing this exercise with myself was interesting, and informative. I noticed that many of the interests I had coming in were in the “Hi Info, Specific Audience” quadrant. I think this makes a lot of sense. Historically, those kinds of tasks have called to me. I really enjoy the process of disambiguating complicated systems and making them simple. In past jobs I’ve had, this has rarely been offered to me, but when it had been, I enjoyed those activities a lot. I think this is a clue to continue in this direction, because those kinds of domains are already aligned with both my “what I can do well” and “what I enjoy doing”, from the Ikigai way of thinking.

However, I am interested in exploring more of the opposite quadrant: the “low info, broad audience” sector. I think I don’t have many incoming preferences for these types of domains because I really just don’t have any experience with them. But now that I’ve been inspired to think about them, I find myself intrigued. I think it could be really fun and fulfilling to work on, for example, huge graphics for a big interior space. Or maybe, an app or a technology that has one simple purpose and has to reach a huge number of people.

At this point, I’m still learning so much, both about the field of design and about my own interests. But the clues are there, and I resolve to investigate them further.

Today in New Media we were visited by Paolo Tossolini, who is an entrepreneur and designer in the AR/VR industry. He explained to us his concept of “mashup” as a strategy for creating something which was not there before. Through the process of mashing-up new technologies and familiar business heuristics, he has been able to sometimes be the first one to position himself to clients with a particular AR proof-of-concept.

I am reminded of something we learned about in our Intro to Graphic Design class this week with Jill, which is that of “gestalt”. Gestalt is the psychological concept that posits that human visual perception is centered on the whole, rather than the parts. Under a theory of “gestalt”, we derive meaning from graphics, or even just sensory experiences in general, through an assessment of the entire milieu at once, as opposed to analyzing each discrete component of an experience sequentially.

Somehow, through “mashup” and “gestalt”, the theme of combining things to make something new seems to be sticking in my mind this week. I certainly have been feeling like my brain is a soup cauldron, rapidly being stuffed with not only ingredients from the five courses we are taking, each unique and disparate in some ways, but also with the special spices that I’m bringing with me from my life outside of school.

For this week’s blog assignment, I chose to submit a graphic/audio mashup. The audio portion is a mashup of two songs that I made at home using my DJ equipment. The songs are: Through the Fire by Chaka Khan and Through the Rain by Mariah Carey, and they are some of my favorite songs to listen to when I am feeling like I need to get through something difficult, such as this transition into my next chapter as a design student. The graphic portion is a composition I made in Photoshop, meant to be a kind of “album cover” for this mashup, and it depicts me working at a desk, something I haven’t had to do in over a year. I depict myself in three styles: photo, hand-drawn, and vector-graphic. Together, I feel like these two portions represent my dreams and feelings that I have around this program. I strongly hope that my growth as a visual designer will harmoniously marry with my existing skills as a musician, to hopefully create a new whole, something that wasn’t there before, something unique and more brilliant than the sum of its parts.