My first phone call was to Sean.
I’d been cooped up in the bedroom of my Katy home for two months due to the COVID-19 pandemic and had been brewing on an idea to begin a student journal for design research. At the time, the design community at UT Austin was just finding its footing with programs such as the certificate in Design Strategies and minor in Informatics increasing in popularity along with organizations like Texas Convergent, Design for America, and TPEO. These degrees and extracurriculars were all becoming hot landing spots for students to practice their craft in design and development. With many already obtaining early design experience through courses, orgs, and internships, but little opportunity for undergraduate academic design research (HCI & UX) on campus, I wanted to gauge the temperature of starting a student-led design journal. My first pitch was to my friend Sean, a mechanical engineering student at UT who I’d known since as early as middle school and worked with at Design for America. If you could survive Sean’s barrage of questioning and blunt assessments while still having him be convinced of the project, then, you might have something special to start with. Typically, his line of questioning led to a more fleshed-out idea, and in this case, what was originally coined as the “Texas Product Design Journal.”
Summer 2020: Values, Intent, and Org Building
I talked to Sean about providing students a platform to write about their design experiences and discuss design-related topics. With this idea, I wanted to discover the middle ground between a magazine publication and academic research. We immediately dove into it and I worked with Sean to create three categories loosely based on the design-thinking process: immerse, ideate, and analysis.
Immerse: Writers research specific topics such as food insecurity or online education and recommend proposals for change.
Ideate: Writers ideate a product/service or discuss a previous course/extracurricular project that tackled a specific problem.
Analysis: Writers review a product/platform/service and recommend areas of improvement.
Afterward, we created guidelines for writing articles such as a minimum 800-word limit, copyright rules, and rules for citation formatting. During this time, I also pitched the idea to Ranjan and Corey who I worked with on previous design and charitable projects, and were both interested in product management as a future career. Once I finished those calls, our four-person team was assembled. From there on, we continued to flesh out the idea by creating an outline with our vision, website categories, and summer schedule (see below). Our first goal was to recruit members and design our website with a minimum of five articles posted before we promoted the organization at the end of July 2020.
We set aside seven weeks with our starting point at the beginning of June:
Week 1
Create guidelines
Begin design template for website
Scope research topics to write about
Week 2
Recruit friends who will write for the org
Write research essays
Continue design of the website
Week 3
Finish writing research essays
Finish initial design of the website
Week 4
Recruit
Edit essays
Week 5
Recruit
Edit essays
Week 6
Recruit
Edit/finalize essays
Week 7
Social media launch
Before we began recruitment, I met with my friend Brooke, the Co-founder and then Editor in Chief of the Texas Orator, a peer-reviewed political publication at UT, to pick her brains on how she started her journal. Getting her guidance on scholarly indexing and physical publishing helped me set some long-term goals for the journal. Afterward, Sean, Ranjan, and I began meeting with those who’d be interested in writing about design. Many of them included students who were already in some sort of design curriculum. As we kicked off our pitch meetings, some of them were rough, to say the least. Many times, they consisted of me providing a fifteen-minute monologue on our plans for the journal and answering any questions our peers had on their minds without them even having a chance to ask them.
“Well, you’ve answered all of the questions I had in your pitch, so I don’t have any,” would be a common assessment of my presentation. This then led to awkward small-talk followed by an abrupt “Well, do you want to join?” from my end. Frankly, I had an easier time with my friends but a tougher time with those we reached out to through LinkedIn. This form of “coldish” calling was something I needed to get better at. In our fourth week and second round of pitches, I called Sean to change up our presentation approach.
“They’re so awkward around us,” I began.
“Well, you’re not giving them much time to talk,” Sean responded.
“I’m asking them if they have any questions and they say nothing,” I said.
“Well, as they said, you answered them already,” Sean interjected. “Just allow them to ask the questions even if we know they’re going to ask them. Not everything has to be covered immediately.”
“That way they’re brought into the conversation naturally,” I added.
“Exactly.”
By the fifth week, our pitch was more refined, now at five minutes with only a few key points being covered. We then allowed the prospective writers to ask questions in areas we didn’t discuss. This led to a more conversational tone. By the sixth week, we had a team of eleven writers with Sean, Ranjan, Corey, and I as Co-founders, seven articles posted on our website, and four being edited. We also retitled our organization to “Texas Design Journal” to broaden its reach. This was a result of one of the early conversations Sean and I had with a mutual friend who had a background in computer science. Their statement about “not having design experience” was something we had to constantly address in our pitches.
“Design is broad and design isn’t new,” I’d tirelessly say. “There’s engineering, architectural, industrial, computational, visual design, and a shit ton more. This journal is about redesigning current ideas and the things we interact with, so you can be an ideator or you can be a critic. That’s up to you. Which means that anyone with the knack of seeing things differently can do this.”
This would often lead to a pause from the prospective writer’s end with the inevitable, “I’ll think about it.” However, by the sixth week, “TDJ,” as our members came to call it, consisted of eight different disciplines: media arts and sciences, mechanical engineering, CS, economics, MIS, electrical engineering, marketing, and advertising.
As planned, in the seventh week, with our articles and website in order, we had our social media launch for TDJ. We used Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook to promote our graphics and interest form with our members promoting the TDJ accounts. To our surprise, many UT students filled out the interest form, leading to more conversations with prospective writers the following week. After we gauged the interest of these students, we recruited six more people totaling our membership to 17. As August rolled around the corner, our leadership team consisting of Sean, Ranjan, Corey, and I came out of the launch feeling pretty good. We had met every goal set within our seven-week schedule. That being said, we all knew that the real work of leading an organization, especially at the height of a global pandemic, was just beginning.
Graphic from Texas Design Journal’s #JoinTheJournal launch [1]
Year 1: Setting Sail
Our recruitment for the Fall 2020 semester was light. We had done a majority of the grunt work in the summer and decided to only rely on sharing TDJ’s Instagram graphics as a means to pique interest. As Corey suggested, we didn’t want to recruit more members than we could handle in our first semester of leading TDJ. The four of us co-founders filled in our roles with me as Editor in Chief, Sean as Managing Editor, Ranjan as Director of Finance, and Corey as Director of Communications. With one more member being added after our fall recruitment season, we hosted our first virtual general meeting in September. Our plan was to host these meetings monthly, giving our members the time to write their articles while acknowledging their other project-intensive extracurriculars. This, in hindsight, led to a more passive approach toward the journal which I had to adjust in our second year.
When it came to our meetings, my job was to create a curriculum that lasted for about 45 minutes, with the other 45 minutes consisting of icebreakers and journal updates led by the rest of the leadership team. For the curriculum, I’d pull my inspiration from books on user research and modify them into an exercise that would fit our journal’s intent. After a while, however, much of the content began to get repetitive forcing Sean and I to constantly be creative with the curriculum. This issue became especially problematic in our second year which we then had to address. That being said, my main goal for the first meeting was to find a way for our members to engage virtually while sparking a design discourse. This began with Ranjan and Corey leading an icebreaker activity in Zoom breakout rooms followed by a design activity led by Sean and me that required groups to identify a challenge and propose a starting point to address the problem. This starting point could consist of a sketch or a list of proposals. Afterward, we all assembled in the main room to discuss our ideas. One group focused on the scannability of a UT website with another member chiming in on how they helped design that exact website. This led to a brief second of silence. With an aura of awkwardness already surrounding the meeting so far, this interestingly made for a tension-cutting moment that made everyone laugh. From there on, all of the members felt free to voice their opinions as they suggested areas of improvement to one another’s ideas while celebrating each other’s ingenuity.
Time passed quickly. The discussions went over time leading into the next part of the meeting. There, I explored the essence of design research. I discussed design as its own distinct study – that design is neither a science nor an art form, but design is design. I talked about innovation and shifting the paradigm of modern design practices to produce novel research. And most of all, I spoke about the spirit of research and uncovering ideas that most never thought of. This lecture helped set the stage for the type of content our journal would output along with the article expectations set by Sean.
"Your articles need to be specific within a topic," Sean said. "Meaning that we should not find your article's idea anywhere else on the internet."
That being one of our final talking points, we wrapped. And with our first meeting in the books, Sean, Ranjan, Corey, and I felt great knowing that we were once again off to a hopeful start.
In the meantime, I was working with UT Student Activities to register the journal with the university. This had already begun as a lengthy process since all of the summer orientation sessions were canceled due to the pandemic. I attended the first orientation for new organizations at the end of August beginning an even longer than anticipated process. Recalling my conversation with Brooke, I knew that to be indexed under Texas ScholarWorks and acquire scholarly credit, we had to be affiliated with the university. To do so, we had to register our journal with Hornslink, UT’s official organization compiler. Acquiring scholarly credit was one of the promises I made to both our staff writers and leadership team in the summer pitches. Being indexed as a scholarly journal recognized by the university would further validate our writers’ work and establish them as tomorrow’s innovators. Cognizant of that, I knew I had to see this through. And more than anything, the last thing I wanted to do was disappoint our members, and quite frankly, my friends.
I assembled a constitution as mandated by UT Student Activities with the leadership team reviewing it upon completion. With everything good to go, I submitted the registration request in the middle of September. Two weeks later, I got an email stating that the request had been denied. I immediately set up an appointment with a Student Activities contact who then gave me specific wording to fix sections within our constitution. However, those additions were a mere repetition of what was stated in the document. If anything, it made for clunky writing and discursive text. Brooke’s advice on how simple it was to start an organization at UT wasn’t entirely checking out and I asked the Student Activities contact about the process.
“We have a new manager,” said the contact. “And they're a little strict about the wording of the constitution so we don’t get in trouble on our end. Ultimately, they’re the one who’s approving or denying your registration request. They have the final word. So, until then, I suggest not hosting any events until everything is approved.”
I understood their intent behind the constitution edits but knew that their suggestion of postponing events was unfair. Resubmitting our request meant that it would place us at the back of the line of an already growing slew of registration requests that had to be reviewed. We had submitted our first request in September since we were told by Student Activities that we could avoid the line of requests if we turned it in as early as possible. Well, this advice didn’t seem to help. After the contact gave me a few more pointers, I thanked him for his time and added the additional text to the document. I had Sean review the constitution and then resubmitted the registration request. I didn’t hear anything back for over a month.
We continued general meetings since I felt that they were essential in providing our writers the guidance to finish their articles. Though, we could not host guest speakers or industry-led workshops since we were advised against it by Student Activities. Then, in November, I received another email that the registration request had been denied. At this point, I was getting a little frustrated. All of the specific wording that the contact had provided me with had been added to the constitution. I set another meeting with the same contact and had Sean join me. With the contact entering the call, they seemed a little more fatigued than before – bloodshot eyes accented with distinct bags and wrinkles around the nose. Just from the formalities, it seemed like they’d done these types of meetings one too many times. As we began, I laid out our process in applying for registration so far. My frustrations had everything to do with what Student Activities had told us and how we had complied from the very beginning, and despite that, we were still at square one.
“I understand if you guys want to use me as your punching bag,” the contact said. “But I’m just relaying all of the information from my manager.”
“Yes, and I totally understand that,” I added. “But my confusion is that if they’re the one who’s approving these applications, why can’t we meet with them directly? Especially, if we’ve been denied twice at this point. I understand they’re busy but can we make a special request to talk to them?”
“Trust me, your org isn’t the only one in this boat,” they responded. “I can give you specific wording but in the end, it’s up to my manager to decide what new thing is missing. They work behind closed doors so I can only relay what they’ve said.”
I could sense that the contact was growing weary of their own management. I responded, “Then by the way things are going, if by some chance we don’t get accepted this semester, can we still continue the process into next semester?”
“Your org should get approved this semester,” they added. “Mainly because I know that if it continues into next semester, you’ll have to start all over again with another application fee.”
Once again, I added the specific wording provided by the contact to the constitution and also to TDJ’s prospective Hornslink page. Sean reviewed it and I submitted it for the third time. As the fall semester came to a close, Sean and I had spent the majority of our time with TDJ running monthly meetings, creating curriculum, and most of all, editing the incoming articles. But beyond that, much else couldn’t be done until the journal was registered with UT. As the last class day of the semester neared, I received yet another notification that the registration request had been denied. This, made me chuckle. What could it possibly be other than a few more words being added? Well, that’s exactly what it was. Sean and I met with our Student Activities contact the day the request got denied and they themselves had a similar sense of gallows humor. However, this time, they walked us through the process all the way up to the resubmission of the request. They thanked us for our patience, Sean and I thanked them for their time, and we got off the call. A week later, I got an email notification that the registration request had been approved.
With TDJ now registered with the university, I began looking into indexing the journal under Texas ScholarWorks to obtain scholarly credit. My starting point was contacting UT Libraries, but, with no email listed, I had trouble figuring out who to talk to. After some digging, I came across a live help desk chatbot on the UT Libraries website. After chatting with a receptionist on the other end, they referred me to the Head of Content Management who then referred me to the Head of Scholarly Communications, Colleen Lyon. A few back and forth emails with her and everything was set. She stated that once our first volume was ready, she’d be happy to index it for us – a rather quick turnaround than anticipated. That being said, talking to various UT administrators that semester reaffirmed my belief that there was an increasing and unnecessary bureaucratic structure that existed at UT, and at large, public universities. Whether it be registering an organization or looking for appropriate contacts, at every point, I had to go through multiple admins to get one simple answer.
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With all of the preliminary hurdles out of the way, Sean and I could finally focus the majority of our efforts on editing the articles. We spent the second half of our winter break editing essays based on a two-part approach Sean had suggested: the first round of edits being substantive and the second focusing on grammar. As the Spring 2021 semester approached, we began preparing for recruitment. Our goal was to have a more full-fledged recruitment season than the last semester, but, I knew that recruiting at the height of Zoom fatigue during an ongoing pandemic was going to be difficult. I worked with Sean to create recruitment graphics and met with the rest of the leadership team to record a virtual pre-made info session to be released online.
Select graphics from the Spring 2021 recruitment cycle [1]
During this recruitment season, a prospective writer submitted her website in the portfolio section of the application. As I sifted through it, it was clear that she had a unique eye for visual eccentricity – a style that could be incorporated into our journal. I met with the writer, Wis, to discuss the possibility of her becoming TDJ’s Creative Director, which she said she was willing to do. At the time, Wis was a senior Advertising major pursuing a certificate in Design Strategies, and I felt that her ability to produce vibrant visuals coupled with her design knowledge would make her a great addition to the leadership team.
At the end of the cycle, we recruited three more Staff Writers including Wis as our Creative Director. Her primary responsibility was to oversee the visual and layout design of Volume One. Our first general meeting of that semester focused on a mood board activity for the first volume led by Wis. Her intent was to establish an overall mood of the journal via the members’ input. Although Sean and I had a ways to go with the article edits, we felt that we could finish them before May if writer deadlines were met.
Then, a week later, plummeting temperatures and an irregular freeze caused the entire state of Texas to shut down, forcing UT to go on a week hiatus – now coined as the Texas Winter Storm. Texas’s failed infrastructure and abandoned leadership from many state officials caused residents to fend for themselves without any heat or running water. With school starting a week later, the educational setback, and above all, the emotional toll of the freeze was being assessed. My professors spent the majority of the first class day back asking how students were feeling, with many emotionally drained. One student described how they lived off-campus and they didn’t have heat for days, forcing them to walk miles to their friend's apartment, only to have that place lose electricity shortly after. Another student described how they had to huddle with their roommates for warmth but felt fortunate to have running water. Overall, the impact of the freeze was varied. One of my roommate’s friends sought refuge on our couch while I heard stories of houses flooding with water from burst PVC pipes causing significant damage to flooring and walls. On my end, my apartment had no running water but I was lucky to still have electricity.
Some images I took from February 15, 2021
With what just happened, jumping back into TDJ was going to be difficult, especially when our members’ school curriculum was being crammed by their professors to account for lost time. For me, my schedule was split between project-intensive classes, TDJ, and co-leading Design for America. After the freeze, I had to play catch-up for both my classes and extracurriculars. In the week that followed, I focused on these three priorities, barely paying attention to my own health. After a brief visit with my friends, I looked at a picture I took with them, noticing that I had a rather skinnier look than usual. I had lost eight pounds in one week. I didn’t know if I should be surprised or strangely proud that I had beaten my all-time record of losing four pounds in one week. Either way, I had to begin prioritizing my health, even if that meant placing less attention on school activities.
Although the Texas Winter Storm lasted only a couple of days, it offset activities by almost a month. Many members couldn’t attend meetings due to their busier-than-before schedules and article edits were delayed. Because of that, Sean and I didn’t resume editing articles until mid-March. April got incredibly busy for the team, including me, with edits then bleeding into May. Some members even dropped out of the journal because of their heavy workload. General meetings were canceled and the leadership team had to play catch up to meet our Volume One deadline set in May, which eventually wasn’t met. With Wis graduating soon, the question became of whether or not she’d be willing to work on the journal into the summer. To her kindness, she said yes.
Wis and I created a schedule for Volume One milestones with the release date set to July 14, 2021. With the articles finalized, Wis, Sean, and I began the layout design process. Meanwhile, Wis was also working on the cover design. This forced me to think about the past eight months and a theme that would best encompass them. I gravitated toward a ship theme since it was the first year our journal “set sail” during a turbulent time. I immediately got to sketching the idea. After I finished, I sent Wis the drawing and she began designing a higher fidelity version of it.
My low-fidelity sketch of the cover
Mid-fidelity to high-fidelity cover art designed by Wis
After the cover design was finished, at the beginning of July, Wis notified me that she would no longer continue with the journal since she had to focus her attention on her new job in New York. Wis had done a good job and I thanked her for helping with the journal two months past graduation. Her dedication is always something I’ll be grateful for. Having less than two weeks left, Sean and I completed the remaining layout designs. We then drafted an editors’ note on a Google document that Sean haphazardly titled, “Toilet Thoughts,” with him adding multiple revisions. The final editors’ note is as follows:
Hello everyone, and welcome to the first edition of the Texas Design Journal! We are a publication dedicated to documenting the design experiences of students at the University of Texas at Austin. The journal was founded in May of 2020 to provide a platform for student voices in the expansive field of design. Our first volume is a landmark edition as it marks the year our team set sail and founded UT Austin’s first scholarly journal dedicated to documenting student product design research. This first edition covers pertinent topics such as designing ethical AI for vulnerable populations, food insecurity amongst college students, the restructuring of instructional design in the COVID-19 pandemic, and much more. Since design is such a broad field, we hope that anyone - regardless of their major - can contribute to the journal with their design-related thoughts, ideas, and proposals. In this edition, you will find articles about academic, extracurricular, and professional experiences. We have categorized this journal into the three crucial components of the design process: immersion, ideation, and analysis, with relevant articles within each category. With each article, we hope you can find something meaningful to take away: whether that be a proposal to improve a product, a conclusion from original research, or a record of a designer’s efforts to create positive change in their community. Thank you, and we hope you enjoy our first edition of the Texas Design Journal.
- Neil Potnis and Sean Feng
After reviewing the journal one last time, we released the first volume on our target date and I submitted it to Colleen to be indexed under Texas ScholarWorks.
It all happened so quickly. It was a little over a year since I made that first phone call to Sean. And although it was difficult to summarize the past year filled with hopeful beginnings, bureaucratic hindrances, and unexpected setbacks, I was proud to know that we accomplished what we had originally set out to do. I was relieved and our team was satisfied. I took in a brief breath of fresh air. Then, three days later, I began planning for the next year.
Year 2: Building Community
In the middle of the visual design process for Volume One, Corey notified me that he was stepping down from TDJ to focus his senior year on other efforts. With two empty leadership positions, my first priority was to recruit another Creative Director to one, establish a consistent look to our social media and journal, and two, plan for releasing Volume Two before the next academic year ended. Releasing the journal in the middle of the summer was setting a poor precedent for future leadership and I took full responsibility for that. I knew that if I were to step down in May and hand the organization to the next Editor in Chief during an ongoing journal edit, it would lead to an inconsistent message for one whole volume. In other words, a volume under the oversight of an executive director had to be finished before the next person took charge. Finding a replacement for Corey’s role as Director of Communications, on the other hand, was a little more difficult, forcing us to shelve the position until we found the right person to fill it.
I reached out to one of our Staff Writers, Parth Ghawghawe, to have him consider applying for the Creative Director position. I had come across some of his screen-printing work and sketches on Instagram and believed that he’d be a good fit for the role. Parth sent me a portfolio of his work and I met with him to discuss his creative vision for TDJ. Just from the energy and careful thought he put into his designs, I knew he’d do a great job.
“Honestly, I think there’s still a lot of work to do regarding our visual design,” I said. “From our social media alone, there’s no consistent aesthetic. The only starting points are our colors: blue, orange, and blue-purple gradient. I also think we could’ve done a better job with the layout design for Volume One, but in the end, Sean and I weren’t visual designers. So, whatever you do for both our social media and Volume Two can set a precedent for our visual design process moving forward.”
Parth inquired about having his own visual design team to assist him with the second volume to which I agreed. But for now, his starting point was to create a more consistent aesthetic on our Instagram which could attract more followers for the Fall 2021 recruitment cycle. I also believed that with the university returning to in-person activities, there was a chance to take pictures of our members in action. Having real faces behind the organization on social media would showcase a sense of community to our future applicants. And if anything, building a sense of community and setting precedent for future leadership was one of my primary focuses for the upcoming school year.
Parth asked me to create a Google spreadsheet of all the upcoming social media posts. They consisted of article posts on our website all the way up to our application release in late August. Parth would create the graphics, run them by me, and then I’d post them on our social media. With just a couple of posts on our social media, a visual consistency was established.
In mid-August, the new leadership team consisting of Sean, Ranjan, Parth, and I met to discuss the Fall 2021 recruitment cycle. We created an outline that began at the end of August and ended in the middle of September. Our main agenda was to recruit a younger cohort to ensure the longevity of the journal. During that time, I also worked on securing a room with Student Activities for in-person monthly general meetings.
Now that we were returning in person, I wanted to add a sense of fun and character to the organization – something that I felt was missing. I believed that this would especially help in developing an identity and culture for the journal. As school began, our first two days consisted of graphics being posted to our social media defining TDJ’s mission and application dates. I then realized that we were only two days away from Party on the Plaza – UT’s student fair consisting of 300 plus student organizations in attendance on the university's pedestrian walkway, Speedway Plaza.
Roger (my roommate and a Staff Writer for the journal) and I went to Sean’s apartment to work on an informational trifold for the student fair. After looking at the order dates and seeing that the trifold would print a day later than we needed, we decided to create two posters that we’d print and stick onto two propped-up foam boards. We designed the posters in Figma with the first being our journal’s Volume One cover and the second stating our values and intent. The next day, Sean and I went to OfficeMax to collect the prints, get the supplies we needed to mount the posters, and print the first volume for students to flip through at the fair. Once we cut the foam board in half and stuck the posters on them, we were ready for the next day. Looking back, adventures like these with Sean reminded me of why I was grateful to have him by my side. We’d have a joint mission and we’d pursue it. And more than anything, I knew that I couldn’t have done half the job I did at TDJ without him. I’ll always be eternally grateful for his support, attention, dedication to the journal, and above all, his friendship over the years. As brutally honest as he could be at times, under that thick skin was a large heart and unwavering loyalty for those he cared about.
The next day, the leadership team and I arrived at our booth at eleven in the morning to set up shop. We were assigned to the first row right across the south side of the UT Tower. This placement was perfect for heavy traffic from all directions since it served as a pedestrian intersection. This was all thanks to my friend, Arnav, who helped manage the tabling placement. Unbeknownst to myself, he had requested that “any org that is design-related should be in the front row because it’s probably Neil’s.” I spread the TDJ flag on the table and mounted the foam boards. We were ready to go.
Poster stands that Sean, Roger, and I designed along with Wis’s cover art
Our assigned table on Speedway Plaza. We talked to over 100 students that day
I decided to have a little fun and take a picture with our Volume One cover in front of the UT Tower
“There’s a whole lot of blue here,” said Sean.
I had a quick chuckle from the comment and we got to work. For the next five hours, in scorching 100-degree weather, Sean, Ranjan, Parth, and I talked to over a hundred students pitching the journal. We ran out of forty of the fifty informational fliers in one hour. Occasionally, the wind would knock our poster stands over, prompting Sean to mount his backpack behind them for extra support. At some point, the poster stand flew rightward knocking Ranjan’s water into our plate of food, completely soaking it. This did not stop Sean.
“Sean, don’t eat the cookie,” Ranjan said.
“Imma do it,” Sean responded.
“Please don’t,” Ranjan begged.
Sean ate the cookie.
The rest of the time was filled with long conversations with students, food, me knocking my head on a copper sign, and Sean delivering the occasional “yo momma” joke hurdled at Ranjan. Everything was going well. At the end of the fair, I was exhausted, but I knew that our efforts were successful. The blue posters visible from a hundred feet away seemed to attract many students. The four of us delivered our pitch with energy and we were both ecstatic and surprised by the popularity of our table. At 5:00 in the evening, we closed up shop and I headed home with Roger who had joined us near the last hour. I came home, took a shower, ate a plate of biryani, and then recorded the virtual info session with the leadership team. The day was a success.
The Party on the Plaza. To the left: Sean, Ranjan, and me. To the right: Parth posing with the poster.
The next week, Sean and I recorded an FAQ video which we posted to TDJ’s social media. Falling in line with the theme of “fun,” we decided to answer our questions from the jar of a blender (to be quite honest, I really couldn’t find a cool enough looking bowl that fit the video). So far, we had three applications and I felt that we’d have more if all of the org fair students completed the digital interest form. But, because our laptops heated up under the scorching sun, and there was no pencil or paper available to gather emails, that idea was a bust. The only thing we’d hoped for was that the fair attendees would go to our QR code on the fliers. But even then, we ran out of most of the fliers in the first hour, having them resort to taking a picture of our last one. My only hope was that if they were truly interested, then maybe they’d still check us out.
After the FAQ video, the majority of the work was done. I sent emails to design professors and interdisciplinary programs asking them to spread the word along with the UT SDCT and Fine Arts Instagram accounts sharing our content. At this point, all we could do was wait until Sunday night when the application closed. Overall, I was proud of our efforts and this was by far the most fun I had with a recruitment cycle. Every one of our leadership team members gave it their all. But, we were only halfway done. On Sunday, a flood of applications came in and the next week was dedicated to interviews.
The leadership team, two staff writers (Roger and Eshna), and I conducted in-person interviews with the applicants. The interviews were spread across five days with three interviewers in attendance per day. Here, we were able to get a sense of the applicants’ values and dedication. One interviewee discussed their experience as a Lead Mentor-in-Residence for the Stanford Science, Technology, and Medicine research program while another talked about their experience running their own educational technology startup. These discussions centered around ideas and innovation. One applicant stated how they saw TDJ as a “think tank” which then got Sean and I pondering all the possibilities of our upcoming general meetings.
After all of these interviews finished, Roger made a statement that pretty much summed up the entire week: “All of these applicants are pretty talented.”
We recruited 16 new Staff Writers with our fall recruitment season coming to a close.
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Sean and I scrambled to assemble a curriculum for the first general meeting which was three days after an intense recruitment season. The challenge was finding a middle ground between those with design experience and those with very little since we recruited more underclassmen than before. Because of this, I decided to create a methodology that would guide the staff writers’ design research process titled, “academic design.” Academic design, in essence, was built off of an already established approach toward research: grounded theory. According to Delve Tool, a website for qualitative research transcription, grounded theory is “a qualitative research method that enables you to derive new theories based on the iterative collection and analysis of real-world data [2].” In simpler terms, grounded theory asks the researcher to work backward and derive a problem statement and hypothesis once all of the data has been collected. A similar approach can be found in the design-thinking methodology that asks the designer to define the problem statement after user research is conducted. With the essence of grounded theory in the back of my mind, I synthesized two approaches: design-thinking and MIT’s creative learning spiral which according to its creator, Professor Michael Resnick, allows researchers to “imagine what they want to do, create projects through playing with tools and materials, share ideas and creations with others, and reflect on their experiences [3].” To be quite frank, the creative learning spiral was designed for children, but I thought it could be beneficial to incorporate its sense of “play” into design research. And although design-thinking was used as one of the inspirations for academic design, I wanted to stray away from its inflexible nature that forced students to settle for the bare minimum.
Candidly, I do appreciate the spirit of design-thinking, and I think its essence of user-centered design, and above all, empathy, is crucial to its process. Design-thinking has been increasingly used in the industry, especially in large companies, to ensure that the user’s needs are on their employees’ minds [4]. Lately, however, school curriculums across the world have latched onto its dogmatic tendencies inviting little innovation to its structure. This has led to a strict and purist approach to the methodology, even in the industry, where the process can slow down efficiency and lead to infeasible designs. I began to grow weary of this method as I saw it lessen efficiency in school, extracurriculars, and during my brief stint with Nokia as an interaction designer. If we were creating infeasible designs that weren’t really going anywhere, then who were they for? Ourselves? Isn’t this just performative work then?
Cognizant of that, I wanted academic design to be flexible and allow students to discover the possibilities of each step. If students didn’t have the tools to prototype high-fidelity versions of their ideas and implement them, I wanted them to discuss their idea’s next step and what needs to be changed within a larger bureaucracy to ensure such a design. Texas Design Journal is about the discussion and the beginning of a discourse that shifts the trajectory of existing paradigms. It’s about how students see the world differently and how the symphony of ideas can invite innovation. Therefore, settling on a prototype as the final destination of a design process wouldn’t be enough, and more possibilities needed to be discovered. From a value perspective, I believed that one absolute solution or step to a design didn’t suffice, and there was always room for additional dialogue. My desire was for academic design to spark that conversation within our journal. The process is as follows:
Steps of Academic Design
Empathize: Consisting of primary and secondary research
Observational research
Interviews and surveys
Internet research
Discover: Define your problem statement
I am investigating X because I want to find out Y so I can help others understand Z [5].
Imagine: Ideate a proposal and come up with some methods to address the problem statement; this can be a:
Product
Service
Procedure
Test: If you’ve ideated a product or service, make sure you test it on the appropriate audience
Reflect: Discuss your findings and where your research can go moving forward
Share: Share your ideas with the world
“The goal of research, in its purest form, is not to have the last word but to keep the conversation going.” - Kate L. Turabian [5].
After describing this idea to Sean for about thirty minutes and designing an activity around it, our curriculum was ready to go. I loved that one of the applicants, and now a Staff Writer, viewed TDJ as a think tank. I thought about all of the possibilities and innovations that could come out of our meetings. Academic design could be the beginning of that.
On Sunday afternoon, we hosted our first in-person general meeting at UT’s George I. Sanchez Building. I had checked our assigned room a couple of days before and felt that its abundance of whiteboards and movable tables was a perfect fit for the journal. We soon found out, however, that it was too big for what we needed, and frankly, a little too warm due to its wall-length window.
The leadership team and I arrived at the building an hour before the meeting to set up shop. I had purchased a slew of materials for the academic design activity: index cards, rubber bands, sticky notes, clay, cloth, and popsicle sticks along with some LEGOs I had from a previous class project. My plan was to separate our thirty-person cohort into five groups and have them rapidly ideate a proposal for a problem they defined. My objective was to see how quickly our cohort could analytically solve a problem within given a time constraint. Once I placed all of the materials on a table and touched base with the leadership team, we waited for the rest of the members to pour in.
As I sat in the tall chair, I got nervous. All of the applicants were beyond qualified to do the work. They all consisted of students who had already done some pretty remarkable things. I thought to myself: was I really the one to lead this journal? Or, was I way in over my head? It’s safe to say that I began facing imposter syndrome in my own org. Many students had signed onto an ideal, and again, the last thing I wanted to do was disappoint them. My mom had sensed this in me when she came to visit a couple of hours before the meeting.
“Don’t get taken back by your members’ backgrounds,” she said. “Know your mission and be confident about it.”
I tried my best to keep this in mind. Members began pouring into the meeting room, and soon, we were about to start.
“Um, hello!” I awkwardly said with an evident tremor in my voice. “We're going to go ahead and get started.”
The room went silent. I got tense. I’ve always been comfortable with delivering presentations, and if anything, enjoyed them. However, this felt different. It was as if every word or statement I made could establish the mood of the room. And this tricky thought is what may have caused the tainted awkwardness of the first meeting. Instead of letting the atmosphere flow, I felt that the job was up to me to define it. Why didn’t I feel this way in last year’s first meeting? Was it because there were zero expectations? And really, were these “expectations” all in my head?” The answer, was most likely a yes.
Coming directly off of a recruitment cycle didn’t help either. Despite all of the meeting planning from the previous day, I still felt underprepared. I rushed through the first couple of slides, covering our values and delivering incoherent thoughts while Sean moved me off of the tall chair since no one could see or hear me. This maneuver cut off my train of thought. Ranjan then got into the icebreakers and we all chatted which seemed to warm things up a little. Once I got to the academic design portion, I felt more comfortable since all of that information was fresh. Although the material was a little lecture-y, I felt that presenting it would serve as a crucial starting point for our writers to begin their research. Afterward, unsure of whether the concepts were fully grasped, I decided to move on to the activity portion to get our members more acquainted with the spirit of academic design.
I explained the research prototyping activity consisting of secondary research, defining the scope of the problem, prototyping, and then sharing our findings. The members got to work. After about fifty minutes, we began sharing our ideas. They ranged from a low-fidelity LEGO parking gate to prevent on-campus bike theft to a patch that would send an electric shock to the user when they fell asleep while working (that last idea was a peculiar one). Everyone engaged and commented on one another’s ideas and then we moved on to article requirements. I restated that the point of the research prototyping activity was to gauge how quickly we could engage with a problem. I ensured our team that their research process would encompass a couple of months rather than less than an hour. After we covered a few more points, the meeting ended. Still, not able to shake off this awkward feeling, I felt that the meeting was lukewarm at best. The members didn’t engage with one another as much as I thought they would. But, acknowledging that everyone was new to one another, I realized that building community was going to take time. The rest of the leadership team, on the other hand, felt that the meeting went well. Maybe, it was just a little different from my perspective, reclusively sitting in the tall chair.
Pictures from the first Fall 2021 general meeting taken by Parth Ghawghawe
A week later, Sean and I met at the Perry-Castañeda Library to conduct a new member workshop. Our goal was to have more of a close-quarters discussion with our new writers and answer any questions that were left hanging from the first general meeting. We split the new members into two groups with Sean leading one group and me leading another. I touched more on our values and intent, and reinforced that if members had little experience with design, they could use the academic design approach as a guide for their research. I conducted an exercise where the writers brainstormed the topics they could discuss. The whole point of this activity was to introduce specificity to research. For example, if a writer wanted to talk about food insecurity, what about it did they want to discuss? What hasn’t been thought of yet? This all circled back to Sean’s statement about not finding an article of the same type anywhere else on the internet. We wanted our writers to introduce original ideas in their articles. To quote my uncle, the Associate Chair of Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University, “it’s not about discovering the first apple, but more so about eliminating the haze that exists around the entire apple tree so you can climb to the top to bear all of its fruit.” In other words, the writers’ articles could serve as a starting point for their work in design innovation.
Activity from the new member workshop
This activity sparked a dialogue and the writers engaged in conversation. Beyond that, we even discussed how one of the members had a bartending license. We all seemed to be warming up to one another a lot more. After the meeting wrapped up, I went upstairs to see how Sean’s group was doing. They were in an intense discussion about one another’s ideas and it was great to see. Afterward, Sean and I came out of those workshops feeling good and happy to know that we had solidified our agenda.
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The first couple of weeks didn’t invite much breathing room for TDJ as a week later we held our first social event titled, “Dine and Design.” I hosted the event at my apartment and Sean and I both cooked dinner. We all gathered for the night talking, playing water pong, and assembling Jenga blocks. With many engaged in multiple pockets of conversation, everyone seemed like they were having a good time. Once the night came to a close and everyone left, Sean, Roger, and I kicked back and relaxed knowing that the next TDJ event wasn’t for a couple of weeks.
Dine and Design
In the meantime, I began classes at the Anna Hiss Gymnasium (AHG) – UT’s renovated building dedicated to design courses and robotics. Realizing that the space would be a perfect place to host TDJ meetings, I contacted the building manager, Christa Ramirez, to inquire about the available rooms. She gave me a tour of the seminar room and said that the room would be ours once I gave her the reservation times. The setting and atmosphere of the AHG were perfect for the journal. And in all honesty, the AHG was the first UT building that truly felt like home. Even if I wasn’t a design major, something about that building invited endless creativity and comfort. In between study breaks, I’d loiter its halls intently examining some of the design projects. It was many times my peers’ work that served as a constant motivator for my projects: their imagination inspired me.
Pictures from when I gave the leadership team a tour of the AHG
We hosted our second general meeting in the middle of October at the AHG. Much of our curriculum consisted of covering types of research and a citation workshop. However, forty minutes into it, I realized that the activity was passing by a tad bit too quickly.
“Hey Sean, can you come outside real quick?” I asked him as everyone engaged in conversation.
He followed me outside the room until I thought we were a significant distance from it and I spoke, “Yeah, I don’t know where I’m going with this one.”
“I can tell,” he responded. “Mandatory meetings huh?”
In five minutes, Sean and I ideated the next steps of the activity but his comment sat with me. In all honesty, it was getting increasingly difficult to add intentionality to these general meetings, even if they were monthly. Were these mandatory meetings really providing our members with essential information to guide their writing? Or, was it all for the image under the name of “community?”
The next general meeting wasn’t for another month. During that time, Sean and I hosted “peer pod meetings” with groups of five writers at a time to conduct check-ins and provide any assistance needed regarding their articles. I was also at the height of graduate school applications along with my senior design project and honors thesis. It’s safe to say that November was the most tired I’d been in a very long time. Our third and final general meeting of the semester included a guest speaker, Dr. Jose Colucci Jr., the then Director of R&D at UT’s Design Institute for Health, and a former Senior Portfolio Director at IDEO. In the meeting, he discussed the transformation of design in the past thirty years and his own experience in the industry. His broad perspective gave our writers an insight into the far-reaching implications of design.
It was then that I felt comfortable with my role as Editor in Chief. Up to that point, I’d attempted to formulate a voice between formal and informal. This often produced an odd cadence in speech led by eccentric humor and perplexed many of our members. In that third general meeting, with Dr. Collucci as our guest speaker, I discovered my voice as a leader: I knew that how I acted and represented myself at that moment would be a direct reflection of the journal. I did not, however, want this feeling to formulate into a delusion of grandeur. In the end, all of our members were in the same boat as me; I just happened to be leading the ship at that moment. In other words, my leadership position didn’t grant me total power or entitle me to patronization. Nor should any leadership position grant this prerogative whether it be in an academic or corporate setting. But, in the presence of an expert design practitioner, my role was to facilitate a respectful and open conversation between the students and Dr. Collucci that reflected the journal’s values and endless curiosity.
Dr. Collucci was gracious with his time and answered one question after another. After the meeting ended, some writers lined up to speak with him and I thanked him for the presentation. We then went on Thanksgiving break and a couple of weeks later, the semester came to a close.
Dr. Jose Colucci Jr. engaged in conversation with our members
The third meeting was at the height of my graduate school applications, honors thesis, and senior design project. I’m looking a little tired here but present nonetheless for Dr. Colucci’s lecture.
At the end of the semester, Ranjan graduated and left the journal. Ranjan had been another essential component of TDJ, and many times, operated in the background handling our finances and recruiting members. His contribution and endless support for the journal were irreplaceable. I began searching for our next Director of Finance and sat down with one of the freshman Staff Writers, Joyce, to discuss her vision for the role. I felt a sort of kindred spirit in her: a wild, untapped energy for creativity and a willingness to learn from those who surrounded her. Just from our conversation about building community, I knew that she’d be another great addition to the leadership team.
Although I planned on editing the articles from the fall semester during winter break, the first half of it consisted of me submitting my graduate school applications. After I was done with this long and exhausting process, I longed for a break. I spent the majority of January watching movies, catching up with family and friends, and working on personal projects. Looking back, it was by far one of the most relaxing breaks I’ve had in a very long time. January felt like three months combined into one, and for some odd reason, I was thankful for that.
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The recruitment for the Spring 2022 semester was light. Our main goal was to recruit additional visual designers to assist Parth with Volume Two. We hung up fliers in the AHG and posted graphics and videos on our social media. After two weeks, we recruited two more members to the team.
Our first general meeting during the spring was low in attendance. I decided to stop making meetings mandatory but wondered if their monthly occurrences were leading to a more passive approach to the organization. But as stated before, even with monthly meetings, we were struggling to justify their intent. The work conducted in the first general meeting, however, was crucial to Parth’s visual design process for Volume Two: creating a mood board and style for each individual article. As a result of low attendance in the first meeting, I decided to conduct group sessions to complete the mood board activity with members. These meetings were mostly high in attendance. I also canceled the second general meeting and tasked Joyce with hosting a social event as a replacement.
Joyce hosted our spring social at Pease Park located a couple of minutes from campus. The planning for this event from my end was minimal. And frankly, it felt nice having to just show up for once. Joyce had taken full responsibility of her role and planned everything. Along with Parth leading the visual design team, for the first time, the organization’s success didn’t feel like it solely relied on Sean and me. We played basketball and sketched pictures, and I began getting a feel of what a TDJ community looked like.
TDJ at Pease Park
After the social, the rest of the time was dedicated to Sean and me editing articles and conducting check-ins with the visual design team. Then, in April, I accepted my offer of admission into Columbia University’s MS in Computational Design Practices program. I thought that with this major decision behind me, and it being my final semester, I’d finally begin feeling sentimental about leaving UT. However, it wasn’t until I began drafting the application for the next Editor in Chief that I began to feel it. I thought about the idea of our second volume placed on the table of the AHG lounge, but with me no longer in Austin. TDJ was going to continue without me and that’s what I had intended: to progress the dialogue of design innovation. With this thought, I knew that the journal would eventually serve as a stationary memory as part of my time at UT. And I hope, to some degree, that I helped make a difference in the Longhorn community.
As I sat in the AHG late at night finalizing Volume Two, I began going through some of the Integrated Design certificate’s capstone reports by the lounge. I scrolled through some of the pages and came across two names that I recognized, Wis and Devina, former members of TDJ who had graduated the previous year. I read through their bios and saw that they had placed Texas Design Journal near the beginning of their list of involvements at UT. Devina also mentioned Design for America, a design incubator that I had once been a part of and led. This, surprisingly, made me emotional. It told me that all of those long hours grinding away at the journal were worth it and the work we did mattered to our members. My eyes began to well up but I quickly put myself together and continued finalizing the second volume. Nonetheless, it was a great feeling knowing that TDJ had cemented itself in the larger design community at UT.
One of my favorite pictures taken of TDJ photographed by Parth Ghawghawe
Epilogue
I began writing this narrative at the tail end of Volume Two’s visual design process. Parth and his team felt that the theme, “atmosphere,” would appropriately encapsulate TDJ.
Like the air, design is everchanging…
In all honesty, I believe that I’ll be able to define my time at Texas Design Journal once I exit the UT bubble and look back at it as a distant memory. I do know, however, that I’ll be eternally grateful for the countless individuals who came together to make this happen. TDJ taught me the value of imagination, sticking to an idea, and that building community takes time, effort, and attention. When I first entered UT, design was strictly understood as a visual medium by the student body. One of my goals with TDJ and additional organizations I was involved in was to work with my peers and UT faculty to shape the narrative of the design industry on campus with one underlying belief -- creativity isn’t bound to a discipline, nor is it bound to an art form, but rather, serves as an interdisciplinary symphony essential for innovation. And through the journal, I was able to meet some pretty remarkable students and strive toward this common goal. So in the end, trust your creativity and have faith in your imagination. And if you ever feel that faith dwindling, know that there are both family and friends who’ll remind you of why you do what you do.
On a final note, there’s a quote from one of my favorite creatives that if you do the thing you love with the people you love, it’s the definition of heaven on Earth [6]. And hands down, I got to do this with the members of Texas Design Journal and the larger, immensely talented UT community. Thank you and hook ‘em forever.
References
[1]. Canva. (n.d.). Canva. Retrieved April 19, 2022, from https://www.canva.com/
[2]. Delve Tool [Delve, Qualitative Data Analysis Tips]. (2021, October 20). Grounded Theory Explained in Simple Terms [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tirZ7ktPW64
[3]. Resnick, M. (2022, March 23). Ten Tips for Cultivating Creativity - Mitchel Resnick. Medium. Retrieved April 22, 2022, from https://mres.medium.com/ten-tips-for-cultivating-creativity-fe79e7ebb83e
[4]. IBM. (n.d.). Design thinking courses and certifications - Enterprise Design Thinking. Retrieved April 22, 2022, from https://www.ibm.com/design/thinking/
[5]. Turabian, K. L. (2018). Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations,: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers (9th ed.). University of Chicago Press.
[6]. Team Coco. (2021, June 25). Conan Says Farewell To Late Night - CONAN on TBS [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4itx6mXEJ6c
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