Huiling Chen

UWP 001 011

03/16/2019

Word count: 1553

“Designing” My Life：A Design Project that Changes the Way I Design My Life

Growing in a business family that almost everyone has his/her own company have

set up a foundation of my business path since I was born. My father hoped he can teach

all his daughters design so that they at least have the skill to support when they enter

society. I was admiring my elder sisters because my father taught my elder sisters earlier

than I did and they could express their creative thoughts without many limitations. To

accomplish the goal of joining them, I sat at the edge of my bed, peeked at my sisters’

computers, and observed them designing through their computers. This was how I learn

to design other than painting on papers at the very first place. I learned some

fundamental art concepts and CorelDRAW, a basic graphic design software, when I

regularly overheard their “courses” – a course that my father teaches my sisters about

the design theory, practice, customers expectation and so on.

To successfully enrolled in my father’s “product design course”, I always picked

my best creative “works of art” to show my father but my father just considered my

works as ordinary drawings from kids. After trying and trying, a special tree I drew

finally caught my father’s eyes. Unlike other trees, the leaves on that tree were all
consisted of layers of circles. I knew this unnatural leaves showed the creative that my

father was looking for because this time, instead of giving some general and vague

compliment, he stared at my work for a long time and thought about my drawing. I

knew my opportunity came. I was overjoyed that I finally became one of the “official

students” of his “product design course”.

After a long learning process, I luckily got a chance to show my creativity to my

very first customer. I started with understanding the customer’s expectations by paying

closed attention to the complicated conversation between my parents and the customer

during the three hours dinner. In the broad topics of the conversation, I caught the point

that the Spanish market was looking for the chameleon. But, I had never designed

anything like the chameleon. What I usually worked on designing were cute figures that

people like such as bird, cat, and dog. I could simplify these animals and portray their

significant traits and the customers can still recognize them. But this was not the case

for the chameleon. I couldn’t make them too realistic because that would be quite scary

to some of the customers and wouldn’t win the customers’ hearts. On the contrary, if I

modified it too much, customers wouldn’t recognize it because they were not familiar

with it and might consider the image was a squirrel.

Even though this was a challenging task, I still grasped the opportunity tightly. To

better understand the process of designing, I tried to relate it to more common steps I

learned from the documentary – constructing a house. Similar to the constructing

process choosing the right location of the house, constructing the base of the house,

selecting building materials, building the main structure of the house, and rebuilding
parts of the house, designing also involves in communicating, researching,

brainstorming, drafting, and revising.

Through communicating, I could understand the expectation of the customer -

designing about the chameleon. However, I was not a talkative or logical

communicator. And my client always treated me as a child, they even brought candies

for me. This frustrated me because I couldn’t receive the information that I expected

from the customers for designing. When I realized these troublesome factors, I was

pretty upset. However, what I could do just listened to the adults’ conversation, sought

for useful information, and kept them in mind.

After learning my customer’s expectation, I researched to gain elementary

knowledge about chameleon and started to brainstorm about what I should consider.

Even though brainstorming just the start of the process, it took me a long time to come

up with ideas. My father expected us to brainstorm about the design at any time

anywhere in order to present the best work. Once I was running with my father in a

park, he suddenly stopped for a long time which made me confused and impatient. But

my father just replied me that “to commit in any particular occupation, you need to love

it, involve it and apply the highest standards in it.” I could not understand it until I was

standing in front of the advertisement during shopping as my father did.

When the new ideas stacked together, I was unwilling to give up any of them

because each idea showed my little soul. However, not all the ideas were suitable to fit

into one design because it would make the work messy and meaningless. In order to

make a perfect work, I normally abandoned the first several ideas I came up with
because they might be the common ideas that everyone could come up with. Thus, I

used the trees with circle leaves to serve as the background on the first layer so that this

special but not over-complicated tree wouldn’t cover the spark of the chameleon. Also,

to attract more customer, I made the chameleon alive by placing my chameleon on the

second layer of the material which made it stood out of the crowd. Having two layers

in a product was a huge advancement to me because normally this kind of product

design only consisted of one layer.

I couldn’t wait to show my “masterpiece” to my parents, but I didn’t receive the

expected compliment. This was frustrating because I showed my best work while my

parents considered it was ordinary. I quitted designing for a while since my father never

allowed us to stop by failure. He forced me to design every day and commented it

harshly which lessened my interest toward design while sisters gained the appreciation.

Even though I knew that they had much more experiences than me, jealous never left

me. My self-esteem pushed me to work harder secretly at night and hoped to exceed

my sisters. Isn’t this the goal that I want to accomplish?

When I recalled my goal, I started the last step of revising immediately. I kept

revising until I ran out of ideas and got lost. I was embarrassed to ask my father for

suggestions because I was still unhappy about his psychological strikes. But I did go

and talk with him to have real improvement. When I learned what he meant about

“learning from the past”, I tried to get more inspirations from previous works that this

customer wanted. And I caught a common characteristic – complexity. I dug into the
chameleon to make it stood out of the crowd by hollowing out part of it and reveal the

first red layer under the holes.

To my surprise, that customer accepted my work except for some other minor

changes. This was such a huge encouragement to me because I was the person that

heavily motivated by compliments. At that time period, I spent more time that I ever

had on designing every day, hoping to get more and more compliments.

However, the revising process didn’t end. I went to the factory with my father to

gain some basic knowledge about how the product was produced and what were the

limitations. In that observation, I noticed that to sew the chameleon on the first layer, I

needed to make sure that the room for sewing was appropriate. Once I placed the sewing

line too far away from the edges, it resulted in the edges always upwarp every time I

took out of my bag. This made me as a user felt disturbing. This meant I need to change

almost every line for sewing just to make it operational. To simplify the changes, I

decided to use a nail at the end of the tail instead of sewing the entire tail. I was glad

that this work successfully.

I was elated that I accomplished the goal of becoming a student of my father’s

“product design course” and studying with my sisters. The Design seemed to be as easy

as turning my hand over when I was observing my sisters. But when I divided the design

process into steps, it turned out that every step was annoying to me. However, just

because of these troublesome processes, the learning process of design shaped who I

am today. Designing the chameleon was more than designing for me because at least I

learned how to be successful. I learned to be patient because a great design requires a

long period of thinking; I learned to be endured because I need to accept the ignorance

of others; I learned to be careful because I need to consider every detail in the work; I

learned to be unassertive because I need to consider the suggestions from my father and

the customers.

Nothing can be considered as easy because they all require the courage to try and

the faith to be the best. When a difficulty breaks down into pieces, it seems like every

step is accessible but it also irksome. However, it is worth to deal with it, because

everything you do, you will eventually learn something from it.