Statement of Interest - Design for Health

Introduction

My interest in Design for Health program started from a peculiar dream I had two days before my grandmother's death. A bird appeared to carry the essential stuff that my grandma needed, flying into the hospital room, and stood right on the handlebar on my grandma's bed. We unpacked the package carried by the bird and used it to save my grandmother. However, this was just a dream and my grandmother died because of cancer. I told her I love her, and she was always in my mind. She couldn't speak at that time, but she looked at me with cordiality and understanding. I was raised by the hardworking woman and I couldn't hold my tears because that was the last time I saw her.

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I got inspired by this dream to start drawing and it came to my realization that it is what I could do. Designing for health is human-centered design, it directly explores human behavior and ways to change it for good reasons. The difference between design for health and other design is that health design is the study for the unpopular and vulnerable people, the odd number and rare cases, whereas traditional design industry focuses mostly on the average users who are the middle majority. By covering both average and extreme cases, I could have the opportunity to investigate more about humanity. As such, it is the next education level in design I want to engage - to design for all human population and with empathy.

At Parsons, my major is product and industrial design. New York City is a spectacular place for art and design and I was amazed at the beauty of every particular detail. My undergrad studies at Parsons has been a solid foundation in design. I find pleasure in designing, making small furniture and tabletop goods. I have come to learn that success is achieved over time through consistency and dedication. I like working with small objects and making them look fascinating. The essence is that I feel like a storyteller, just helping small objects to tell their stories. I entered a world with endless pleasure working with different materials on variable projects. Nonferrous metal offered me a minimalistic perspective while ceramics taught me the language of fire and earth. I liked every material I worked with.

During my junior year, an experienced professor who worked for many years as an architect and industrial designer greatly influenced my life. Being my studio instructor, he taught me more about the boundary between art and design. Traditionally, product design is to cultivate technical and critical skill to enhance human activities. In most projects, our goal was to provide solutions to the existing problem while addressing contemporary reality. The goal-oriented design is challenging but I have always focused on developing projects out of pure appreciation, which comes out of empathy.

Let's take woodworking as an example. Knowing that this material was once a living thing which could easily be older than me, I make every cut carefully because I respect the fact that time has gone through this piece of plywood and left the growth ring as marks. Therefore, I have to be responsible for its worth. That mentality is what I want to bring to my next level educational platform in the Design for Health program, and hopefully AGE-WELL. There will not be a chance for me to design something for my grandmother anymore, but there are millions of sick grandmothers out there, and they deserve more. With the abundant resource AGE-WELL holds such as the training, workshops, and the mentorship program, I want to utilize them to achieve AGE-WELL's mission as well as my goal as a designer, which is to help aged citizen and caregiver to satisfy their needs. The ultimate goal of Design for Health, in my perspective, is to present a system which works for the aging population and avert sickness. I look forward to a day there would be fewer people getting sick, and more senior citizen feeling happy about their lives. Essentially, I have been in the US for seven years and experienced challenges and breakthroughs, but I keep reminding myself to stay focused to learn American and Canadian perspectives, I am ready to emphasize the later. It is not random for me to go to Toronto, but it is a desire to expand my knowledge. Through research, I would contribute towards evidence-based techniques to health challenges and improve the livelihoods of others particularly the aging population. As such, my goals, experience, and area of interest align with the AGE-WELL goals and I believe I am suitable for the scholarship.