Working for many years in mostly solitude, writing and being a very selective person when it comes to pairing up with clients here at Design Kompany, especially these last ten years, I have noticed something. There are so, so many very talented people in the world who are creating things that make you stop and go, ‘Wow.’ Those amazing pieces of output, I feel, are made because the person has done a whole lot of work to figure out what it is they want to say, and how they want to say it. I know now why when I was in my younger years I was passed over when I applied for grants and things. Of course I applied for them, I was confident in my skills and potential. But: I didn’t have the voice. The creative voice, and the creative confidence, that it takes to make… something worth taking note of. Someone told me my writings were ‘notes’, in those days. It was something I remember being offended by. But looking over all those notes upon returning to where they were stored and archived in physical boxes for many years, I could see that he was exactly right. I didn’t know what to say, in those days. I just wanted to say something. The danger of this was that chasing after the prizes, something that would have been easy especially if you pigeonholed yourself or contorted to fit some kind of ‘inclusivity’ or ‘diversity’ tick box, it could get out of hand very quickly. You would be making products. Products that someone somewhere with an agenda to fill, and a box to tick, would be like, ‘Oh, this person seems easy enough to work with.’ It wasn’t like they would want someone who had something to say, they would prefer, I felt, someone who would go along with playing a part. The part that says, for example, ‘Yes, I am your token Indian-American person who got this award! Yes, I will go up on your panel for free and talk at length about the merits of your award-giving! Yes, I will kowtow to the systemic bias that says I can’t do this on my own, based on my own very strong conviction that what I say has value, because it’s so much easier to roll along with your star-studded entourage and try to piggyback on that instead of doing the hard work of years of figuring out what I am about!’
Some will say, ‘You’re lucky you got to do that.’ Some will say, ‘You are so fortunate.’ Am I? I gave up a lot to get to this place of being able to write the way I write, design slowly, and with intention. To choose my choices, and fill my time with only those people and things that make me feel like they are helping me grow, and change, and discover new things and ideas. Because that for me is where my art is: in the spacemaking, and bring of people together to converge, convene and find… a kind of inspiration. It’s nice when this gets to happen in Design Kompany’s studios, borrowed spaces over the years in the likes of Bauhaus Cafe or Joe Bar in Seattle, when they were there, or one of the Browns in Phnom Penh. To meet, talk, and consider conversing further. To discover ideas, to route ourselves towards quality-searching, to find out what we don’t know yet about one another, the place where we are, and ourselves. It sounds like personal development, but I feel it’s just quality design process. Slowing down, seeing something new, and inviting ourself to walk towards it… that’s my role in this. A process of showing up, to see what might be out there, besides what you’re doing already. I know this is esoteric and I accept that. The philosophy of identity is my whole thing here. New, Express and Share are my mandates, which was how I set up Atelier S P A C E popups in Northern Europe and Southeast Asia to discover worlds of characters very new to me, hear their stories, record what felt honest and genuine, reflect and share with the people I met to make sure I got their story right, and share with the publications of zines. So far, so good. Am I rich? Of course not. (Does that make you feel better? Lol. Some people love it. What can I say, haters gonna hate.)
What matters now is making the most of all the learning and changing and growing, all this time. To offer experiential learning workshops, online and offline, just like I was doing with STEER in 2012. That one was the first-ever project that was a virtual one and it turned, for me, into SELF, and THE MIRROR, and then, EXPANDING WINDOWS. All of these short courses gave people room to pause, reflect, and meet in community if they felt like it, to discover and co-discover. That has never changed. UNBOXED is the current one, it’s here.
You can be so satisfied if you know what you like, and do those things, regulary, every single day.