Illuminating Design as an Entrepreneur and Artist
Interview by Kim Heng; edited by Liv Jenks
In this installment of “Illuminating Design,” Stanford Womxn in Design’s interview series, we reached out to Kaixi Yang, a recent graduate of Stanford’s Product Design program, to understand how she balances being an artist, entrepreneur, and interdisciplinary designer.
Below, you will discover Kaixi’s varied and vibrant journeys into design, insights into her current roles, and where she sees design headed.
Kim Heng: To start, could you tell us a little bit about how you got into design? Where are you now, and what was your path to get here?
Kaixi Yang: I grew up walking through nature and continuing a decade long story on these walks — and with graphic novels and cardboard cities — with my brother, who is a bit of a walking encyclopedia. I spent most of my time being confused by the systems around me, and I found solace and recognition through drawing, a legacy that passed from my father, from his father. I drew all the time, until I found a significant ego shift. When I was drawing the Madonna (virgin and child), I felt a sort of lifting that made me realize that art could be a form of research. I never looked back, and I actually became an artist. At the same time, the works of the MIT Media Lab were beckoning me, being so aesthetically and technically enticing. Something about the building of future realities really appealed to me.
When I worked my ass off to get to Stanford, I knew who I was, but would face obstacles that would challenge me to no end. I interned with Nick St Pierre’s Magik Gallery, a mixed reality advocacy entity, and then I later co-founded an art and tech collective, ArtX, with Ramin Ahmari. This created opportunities for creatives to see all media from tech to paint as valid, and to focus on the ethics of creating in Silicon Valley, which is such a capital-drenched area.
I interned for wearable tech companies StretchSense and AVA; worked on ventilators and ophthalmoscopes; mapped value chains in Delhi with Vertiver; painted with artists like Alexa Meade, and made my best friends, who I am very proud of and who keep me the crazy, sensitive, and outrageous human I am today!
Heng: “Design” incorporates so many different things, and through your many different experiences it sounds like you’ve really come to embody what it means to be an interdisciplinary designer. For you, how would you describe your role as a designer?
Yang: At the moment, it’s optimizing and promoting my abstract calligraphy at kaixiyang.store — please check it out, I think you’ll love them!
I’m supplementing myself with work on breathable underwear, designing a flatpack coffin, and forming events to help Auckland transition into a climate resilient city with net zero emissions with the WEF Global Shapers hub I’m a part of. I’m continuing this work, exploring the subconscious with EEG’s and Michelle Huang, who wants to turn such brain data into healing animations. I’m also creating digital art with a desmoid tumor patient, Vanessa Slavich, and digital artist & PD alum Dion Brandt-Sims to make and sell an NFT to support her cancer research case with Research To The People.
And I’m forming a sustainable design agency and innovation lab. More to come! Reach out if interested! We have an amazing team, just figuring out the governance right now, and then onto the proof of concept. We aim to work on circular design innovation by making fashion objects that are non-exploitative and aesthetic.
I am feeling like sometimes I am not matching my ambitions, as I can only do so much in a day, but I am lucky that while I build myself out of ‘broke’, that I am doing exactly what I want to do with my life, which is a privileged thing!
Heng: It’s amazing how many different ongoing, parallel projects you’re working on. As you juggle these projects and explorations, what values are central to your design thinking process?
Yang: Design is about allowing the right path to come to you, synthesized by your intuition, given a voracious absorption of the inputs that describe the problem you are trying to solve. What Stanford’s Product Design program does best is emphasizing that whoever you are designing the products for should be the primary source of your information. In vocalizing or putting ideas on paper or prototype, you bare it out for the world to see whether the idea in your mind aligns with theirs.
Design is all about innovation as well — that is, an agent of evolution. That’s why I pay attention to nature as the greatest teacher. I think humans think they’re hot shit, but literally, we are on a continuum that has been in motion for billions of years.
In terms of values, I focus on suffering as something I wish to eradicate through design. It’s my strength, having a permeable heart.
Seeing the truth as complex and the world as an every-dimensionally fluid system is what it is. People make decisions in mysterious ways, but if you dance between the poles of all the forces that be, you will find a way.
Also, don’t harm or exploit anyone, if you can help it. See your life as a gift, and your soul as a light.
Heng: I love what you said about design as a catalyst for evolution. Building on that, how would you define good design? What does that mean in terms of sustainable design for you and the company that you’re building?
Yang: I learn a lot from the act of making puns — this rhyming nature of my brain is something that flows into poetry, metaphors, harmonies — ultimately, unity. There is a resonant frequency of the universe I am trying to aim towards somewhere in infinity. The holy people with the Hebrew bibles and warmongers of the housebound Mongols knew the power of rhymes — they’re sticky, and they transmit through time and rhyme — it’s kind of a way of cheating death.
When you achieve a good design, it unlocks a kind of a similar cathartic quality of a problem well solved.
Heng: You mentioned that you loved how Stanford emphasized connecting with the populations that you are actually designing for. How do you incorporate intersectional perspectives into your design process?
Yang: That’s a tricky one! Everything is an intersection! How to unpack this?
Well, I see that our civilization has gone through a lot. A lot of conquest by violence. A lot of discovery and displacement to get to a place of ‘abundance’. And we’re still not happy. We are an insatiable culture.
I recommend reading Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Native American professor Robin Wall Kimmerer, Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg, and Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth. These books made me realize that we are living in an anomaly and that we have a lot to learn from the past, from listening and advocating for our feelings and needs and that chasing unending growth is unhealthy.
Listen to a lot of people who do not fit the molds of this elusive and false ‘normal’. Have confronting experiences, and hold yourself accountable. We aren’t trained to treat some people as valid, and why is that? Take a look at who is in power.
Heng: In this series, we’re talking with designers at a variety of companies — some big, some smaller and emerging. How are you shaping the design process at your sustainably-minded startup?
Yang: ‘Start-up’ is honestly a good mindset wherever. Sara Blakely, the CEO of SPANX, encourages everyone in the company to be their own entrepreneur. Taking ownership of unconventional, curious methods of problem solving and believing that you are invested can be a beautiful and challenging thing.
The sustainability challenge is about writing, changing, and getting everything to adopt a whole new language, across legislation, economics, physics, genetic modification, material landscape, eco-ethics, indigenous rights, agriculture, physical design and UX design. Basically, everything needs to change, and we got to act fast.
In terms of designs that have the potential to change things, I like to focus on energy, and biocompatibility (compatibility with the earth so terra-compatibility?), and bio-powered solutions. I see things like low data throughput websites that are designed to spare processing power. I see mycelium being explored. Microbes, proteins, biological processes as an agent to reverse climate change. I’m aware of a company that is genetically modifying trees to suck more carbon.
And it’s all a big experiment, innit?
To cope, I vent often and to understand that we live in a torturous paradox — simultaneously exploiting yet being a champion for the environment. And also that we have less than 10 years to reverse this climate emergency, while not making those less privileged suffer greatly. We have to clean up a legacy of destruction, and it sucks. I’m an optimist though, until the day I die.
Heng: This is a big, broad question, so unpack it in whatever way feels right: How are design principles changing today? Who is leading that change? Where is design headed?
Yang: I see a confusion between where we stand with natural and unnatural things. That creates a division in the sand that says that everything that humans create equals bad, from GMOs to plastics.
It belies the fact that everything we make is from the earth. As humans, we are part of a continuum of evolution, and our products and systems are evolving too. Just imagine the earliest telephone, to the Nokia brick to now: machine intelligence and the world’s information in your pocket. We had early grasses in the Middle East, which got cultivated into wheat, and now we have all sorts of breads. We have ideas that evolve, and we can make stuff that evolves too. I love seeing what people like John Edmark and Skylar Tibbits are doing: making architectural forms that mimic the folding spirals of nature, or the self-assembling capabilities found in proteins and cells.
I think there may have been an overemphasis of the singular star designer that aligns with this winner-takes-all mentality. I think the work of people who stoke the fires of an ecosystem should get the credit too. Facilitating the space for fantastic collaboration, with the skills of deep listening, advocacy of people’s strengths, and saying ‘I don’t know’ when you legit don’t know, has been a way for me to grow my leadership. I’m not a great leader yet, but I’m trying.
Heng: Many SWID members are just beginning their design journeys. How can design skills be cultivated? What do you wish you had known as you made the transition into working in design?
Yang: Care about craft, as well as the message you are making real. Care about where you feel most aligned: mission-wise, work-style wise. Care about cultivating your support network. Care about helping people around you. Care about design being anywhere. Care about elegance being an expression of clarity from the soul to the exterior. Care about people. Care about yourself because no one can do that the way you need. Care about care.
It seems like both artistic innovation and sustainable innovation are cutting edge fields that hold significant risk. If you are privileged to be in a position to pursue this, use that privilege to do the good work — be generous back, otherwise the world won’t get better!
In this series, we’ve cast a wide net, talking to industry leaders in health, wellness, education, tech, and social entrepreneurship to bring you answers to big design questions, including: What is “good” design, and how is that definition evolving? How do you navigate challenges? How can intersectional perspectives be incorporated into the design thinking process? What advice do you have for students just embarking on their design journeys? Discover our other recent articles below.
