Show Notes
This episode, we’re joined by an extra special guest, Lee-Sean Huang (he/they), a queer first-generation Taiwanese, Cantonese American designer and educator based in New York City and Providence. Lee-Sean Huang is the director of Design Content and learning at AIGA and a co-founder, creative director of Foossa, and teaches design and innovation at Parsons and SVA.
This episode, we talk about:
- Lee-Sean’s “midlife crisis” and how he is navigating a new chapter in his life
- Navigating corporate world and academia with queer & Asian identities
- His work with the New School and advocating for teachers
- The role of creativity and design in social impact
- Dismantling perfectionism, and leaning into imperfection as an invitation for social change
- The power of community-centered design
You can find more information about our guest:
- @leesean on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn
- Website: https://foossa.com/leesean-huang
Learn more about Yellow Glitter:
- Instagram: @stevenwakabayashi
- Subscribe to my weekly newsletter: mindfulmoments.substack.com
- Website: yellowglitterpodcast.com
Show Transcript
Lee-Sean Huang: There’s also something about the iterative process, which is inherent to any creative process. But when you’re designing together, right, it’s like, how do you say, share your sketches or share your, your prototypes in a way, that’s authentic and allows for participation rather than waiting until you have something that’s far more polished, which like people are afraid to then mess with, right?
Uh, that, that’s also something to think about in terms of how imperfection is also an invitation for participation.
Steven Wakabayashi: Hi everyone.
My name is Steven Wakabayashi, and you’re listening to Yellow Glitter Mindfulness Through the Eyes and Soul of Queer Asian Perspectives. This episode, we’re joined by an extra special guest, Lee-Sean Huang. Lehan Huang. He/they is a queer, first generation Taiwanese, Cantonese American designer and educator based in New York City and Providence.
He is the director of Design Content and learning at AIGA and a co-founder, creative director of Foossa. He also teaches design and innovation at Parsons and sva. A Welcome to the podcast.
Lee-Sean Huang: Thanks Steven and hi everyone.
Steven Wakabayashi: Hi. I’m really excited to connect with you. We were introduced through a mutual friend and it seems like we’ve had many overlapping experiences and people and spaces, and I thought you would be an awesome guest and just sharing a lot of what you’re working on currently and what’s also coming up for you in your life right now.
I just wanted to ask first, like what’s been on your mind lately? What’s coming up for you?
Lee-Sean Huang: Well, well a lot of things, certainly in our country and in the world, but starting with the more personal bit. I recently went to my 20 year college reunion and so I’m 42 years old. It’s been 20 years since I graduated from undergrad at Harvard.
It was nice to see some people who haven’t seen in like over 10 years, some people in 20 years. And I think it’s just one of those life milestones, right, of like, I guess I am officially middle aged and what do I wanna do with myself when I grew up? And some of these questions kind of continue even though I’ve done cool things of the 20 years since college.
Less so about like comparing myself to my classmates. Cause honestly I’ve taken sort of a path less traveled for a lot of Harvard grads. So I don’t think I have like the same life or career milestones to compare myself against. It’s more just a, a personal thing wow, it’s really been 20 years.
This ride is probably more than half over.
Steven Wakabayashi: Well, let me ask first before we get into your tr like, where, where has your classmates gone primarily? When you say like, your pathway deviated a little differently from them.
Lee-Sean Huang: Yeah. I don’t know what it’s like today for more recent grads, but certainly, you know, for class of 2003, a lot of people went into investment banking.
They went to work at the Goldman Sachs of the world, of course, or they went into, uh, working at McKinsey. Like some people went straight into say med school or graduate school of some kind, or academia, you know, some people doing like Teach for America type things. I went to teach English in Japan and then I got into design and I’m happy to Yeah, say more about that story, but yeah, that, that’s kind of what happened, right.
Or people went into like law or these kind of professions where you kind of know where the milestones of success are, whether like you make partner or not or start your own Yeah. Law firm or, or whatever. Right. Or the same at McKinsey type things. And so I haven’t had that. I’ve worked in government or worked for my own studio, or now I’m working in nonprofit and academia.
So it’s more about, for me, a kind of portfolio career of having multiple things going on at the same time rather than, than these like traditional milestones of getting the corner office or making partner or whatnot.
Steven Wakabayashi: Yeah. Which is interesting because I feel like the typical Asian path would be exactly that, right?
Mm-hmm. Go to Mackenzie, go be a doctor, go be a lawyer. And I’m just curious, even for you stepping into the realm of creativity and design, what has that journey been like, especially in navigating Asian family dynamics?
Lee-Sean Huang: Yeah. I think in the scheme of things as it relates to career stuff, my parents were pretty hands off compared to some of the stereotypes. So both of my parents have master’s degrees. They ended up with a successful small business selling computers in suburban Phoenix, Arizona where I grew up. And they’re retired now. But as it related to growing up, like they were really open to me doing creative things.
I guess they’re, I did have the stereotypical Asian thing of going to piano lessons and I also played cello for a while, so I did do that. But besides that, I think I took like two SAT kind of crash courses and practice tests, and then I took it twice, got the same score, and then, uh, the rest is kind of history there.
But there was never any pressure to like, oh, you have to major in whatever. Right. It was pretty hands-off and kinda after college too, there was a period when I came back from Japan where I was considering going to culinary school, uh, which I didn’t end up doing, but they were pretty cool with that idea too.
It wasn’t a, you have to do X, y, and Z kind of thing.
Steven Wakabayashi: Huh. That is fascinating. I, I’m curious, what do you think opened your parents up to you having a more creative career pathway? Because I, I’m just curious, do you think it was like the experience of their entrepreneurship, the foray into computing, because that’s typically not the norm for a lot of Asian, Asian-Americans?
Lee-Sean Huang: Yeah, I mean, I think in some ways it comes from a certain privilege, but also their own, I guess less linear journeys. Like my dad was actually a chemical engineer and his specialty was in, I guess what we call fracking now. But he couldn’t get a job in that when he got out of grad school in the eighties.
And so ended up with some business partners, some other Taiwanese Americans who started like doing essentially import export. Stuff of computer parts and then building their own PCs and selling that to companies and, and government offices and stuff like that. So I think there’s already that of like them seeing that you can go study something, but then life will throw you a curve ball and then they ended up being super successful at that.
So I think that that’s a part of it. And then there’s also, as a result of that kind of success, I don’t think they depend on me to take care of them in a way. You know, I was talking to another friend of mine who comes from an immigrant family in his case, right. Uh, from an Ecuadorian family and you know, he does feel, more of a responsibility now as an adult to like take care of his mom financially as she gets older and, works less and is kinda transitioning into retirement.
But my parents are fine, you know, financially. So I think part of that was also like a, a relief on that side. So I guess, yeah, part privilege and part like personal journey in terms of the hands-off part and I think is like, okay, I already did what they dreamt of, I guess by getting into Harvard. And so the, what I do afterwards,
Steven Wakabayashi: that is true. You go, you want some Asian child points and I feel like that experience, especially with your family working with computers was your introduction at a very early age to computers, right?
Lee-Sean Huang: Yeah, definitely. My first computer was a Commodore 64, which I guess for the young people listening to this was like a computer that you plugged into your tv.
I think they had like floppy discs as well as these like cartridges that looked like, uh, a Nintendo cartridges that you could plug into there. They went to schools with Apple two E’s and stuff like that and Amigos, uh, to take a trip down memory lane. But basically, yeah, through that I worked there for a few summers when I was in high school at my parents’ company, like assembling custom PCs.
But I also had the chance to take part in some like afterschool programs and summer programs that were run outta Arizona State University, which are, I think now defunct now, which is kind of sad. But there was something called cap. Mm-hmm. The Center for Academic Posity. And it was essentially for like gifted kids to learn different things.
And so I got to learn like computer programming with Lego logos. You could make like awesome little turtle draw on your screen or make your Lego motors move. And then I also had the opportunity to take classes in like TV production and video production, as a teenager. So having those opportunities from a relatively young age where my kind of soft entry into design and creative content production.
Steven Wakabayashi: Mm. That’s interesting. And I’m curious, did you also have a career just doing programming or did you go directly more so into creative design career afterwards?
Lee-Sean Huang: Yeah, I did learn how to code a little bit. I think I’m more like a designer who. Can do a little bit of coding, but I was never like a developer or anything like that.
Just to give some broader brush stroke. So it was undergrad at Harvard. I actually studied political science and was interested in going into
Steven Wakabayashi: Oh, did you.
Lee-Sean Huang: Yeah. Into like either diplomacy or the ngo Yeah. Sector or something like that. And that was part of what brought me to Japan. Both kind of, of, um, well, there’s some family connection as well.
So being Taiwanese, my maternal grandparents actually spoke Japanese cause they grew up during the colonial era. Yeah. But they used it as like a secret language so that my mom and her siblings wouldn’t understand. Right. So it kind of skipped a generation, but we grew up around the food and other cultural things.
So there was that. Plus I wanted to have some more experience living abroad and improving my language skills. So I went on the JET program, which is like a Japanese mm-hmm. Government program to teach English. There I would see like, okay, do I wanna go to grad school or whatever? Kind of fast forward a little bit.
I came back to the us, landed in New York City, worked for a couple of years in the nonprofit sector doing essentially like political communications, so like email campaigns, early social media kind of campaigns for environmental and human rights causes. And then from there, that’s when I was like, okay, well I have this computer stuff going on.
Most of it from like being a teenager and just messing around. I’d also like taught myself how to do some graphic design music production, cause I also played in bands. And so we made our own stickers and album covers and stuff. Mm-hmm. But I felt like I needed more kind of structured learning in that sense, because this is.
This is like 2006, 2007, 2008. Yeah. So this is before like you could just watch pretty much any tutorial on YouTube or
Steven Wakabayashi: That was pre YouTube. Those are like cat videos on YouTube at that time.
Lee-Sean Huang: Yeah. Yeah. So it was more like, uh, YouTube was more like America’s Funniest Home videos at that point. Yes. Than like the library of everything.
So I went to NYU basically for, for grad school. I had a program called I T P Interactive Telecommunications Program, which is this kind of cryptic name for a program that was founded in the late seventies, but it’s basically like art, design and technology. So I did that, worked at a creative agency for a few years, then started my own studio, fusA, and then also started teaching a couple years after I graduated as well.
So those are kind of how I got into the design world more, officially.
Steven Wakabayashi: Yeah, that’s so, so fascinating that I’m also, so I see a lot of trends where oftentimes, especially people who weren’t necessarily trained in design as academic, right? Mm-hmm. As undergrad or early on, that we do design as a part of just checking some of the boxes, right?
In your case, creating stickers for your bands, doing flyers, and that allows folks such as yourself to go, oh wow, this is actually fascinating. And I’m just curious, especially in doing the creative work and pivoting into some of that stuff after going into grad school. I’m just curious, in terms of just coming up for you, of just even starting your own agency, like what has led you to that point, because oftentimes, you know, some people are just so mirrored by like, oh my God, there’s so much I can do that it’s even so overwhelming to chart your home path in doing your own work.
Lee-Sean Huang: Yeah. I think part of it was necessity. Mm-hmm. And part of it was also not knowing better. So that, uh, resulted in some maybe stupid bravery.
So what I mean by that is I had been working at the same agency since my second year of my master’s program. It’s, called Purpose. They’re still around. I think they, they sold to a larger holding company, but they still exist. and I had a lot of opportunities there to grow. I was actually the first in-house designer that they hired.
I got to do some recruiting work to build out a design and tech team. I had the chance to help open the office down in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. So I lived and worked in Brazil for a while as well. So it was a great opportunity. Um, and I learned a lot. I think after a few years though, I had like, I guess a quarter life crisis then, since we’re talking about my midlife crisis now, where I was like, okay, well what does this mean?
It felt like my only path forward at purpose or at somebody else’s agency was to either go into the kind of strategy account management side of things or kind of double down on my design skills, which I think wasn’t necessarily a match for what they were looking for, in a small team. So some other life factors happened.
So my business partner, who’s also now my husband got laid off from a consulting job and had to move cities back to New York City and then Hurricane Sandy happened. So we, lost power for a few weeks and then that was like a kind of like, I guess shaking up the snow globe kind of moment in terms of what are you doing with your life and I don’t know, when you’re like sitting in the dark with no TV or internet or hot water, you’re like, why don’t we just start our own design agency? Cause things, it can only get better from here. Yeah, I guess. So that was one of the things, and I guess if I had known a little bit better about what that would entail, I may not have done it.
So I think there is some sort of like advantage to slightly youthful ignorance in some cases.
Steven Wakabayashi: Yeah.
Okay. Off tangent, but like, were, were you south of Manhattan during sandy?
Lee-Sean Huang: Yeah, so we, I was actually living, I had my own studio apartment down in the financial district. I was evacuated, the building flooded. It was, mm-hmm. When the building flooded, uh, they actually told us, oh, well you can’t move back for like, at least six months, if at all. Luckily it ended up being like six weeks and they, you know, brought in a generator and pumped out a whole bunch of water. And my apartment itself was on the 10th floor, so nothing happened to my actual apartment.
And then my partner at the time was living in town, so on 14th Street Avenue B, so it was still in darkness and I. I went to his place the night of the storm. So we saw and heard the flash of light at the ConEd plant. Oh my God. And like, you know, two minutes later, like all Yeah. Uh, lights out. So it was that.
But his, his family lives on Long Island and we also had friends up in Harlem so we could like go and shower and stuff. Mm-hmm. So it was okay.
Steven Wakabayashi: Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like finally New York is starting to build past so much of, uh, cuz I’m also in financial district right now. And finally like a lot of the stuff that got decimated by Sandy are starting to finally get built up.
But aside from the fact, I really also love just the work that you’re doing today, which I think is quite fascinating, knowing your background. Mm-hmm. Studying political science and also design. I feel that a lot of the stuff that you do now kind of is at the intersection and I’m just curious. Coming out of your studio and just seeing what was next for you, what made you want to pivot towards something that was more equity centered or thinking about how you are establishing equity for communities around
you?
Lee-Sean Huang: Yeah, I think even when I was doing fusA full-time, our design practice is what we call community-centered design, and I think that comes from my background in essentially activism community organizing for these other things I’ve done before, whether it was for cultural exchange, working in Japan or environmental human rights issues, is that you have to both kinda communicate and create artifacts, whether it’s the email blast or the posters or or whatnot, as well as enable people and encourage people to take collective action on something in their community.
So even at fusA, we were starting to evolve in that direction. Obviously we did some corporate work and some startup work to pay the bills, but. We started pivoting into some government contracting, some service design and co-design with various communities designing public services in New York, uh, is an example of that.
And then kinda a few things, right, like in 2018, my husband went back to school at MIT, so we put our, studio more on like a side hustle kind of mode. I took a job at AIGA, which is the oldest and largest professional association for design. I’m kind of in a hybrid like community and content and education role there.
Um, and then I’ve been teaching this whole time. So there’s what I do in my design work. And then more recently I was, elected to be part of the bargaining committee at the new school, which is where the Parsons School of Design is based and where I’ve been teaching since 2016. And I thought it was like just basically, actually two of the organizers from our union were on my podcast at AIGA and we just kind of kept in touch, after they were on my podcast and they’re like, oh, do you wanna run for this bargaining committee thing? And I said, yes. I thought it was like, okay, we’re just gonna negotiate a contract and I’ll get to learn about how this stuff works and fine, you know, a few hours over a few months.
And then it, long story short, it kind of spiraled a little bit in terms of the contentiousness of the contract between the part-time faculty, which make up nearly 90% of the teachers at the new school and the university management. We ended up going on strike for 25 days last fall in November, December, uh, which is the longest adjunct faculty strike in US history.
And then, Ended up getting a contract, which was a compromise, but was overwhelmingly approved by our membership. So I think I see that actually as an extension of my design work of like, essentially how do you create power and how do you exercise power collectively and more traditional forms of design are a part of that, in terms of like social media posts that I was creating, I was doing communications PR stuff with the press, making videos and stuff like that to communicate with our different stakeholders. But I think the larger picture really is the, the building power bit,
Steven Wakabayashi: which I think is really. I think it’s really the essence of creativity, right?
Where mm-hmm. We were having a discussion and just creating some show notes for today’s podcast. And one thing that came up in our discussion right, was this construct of creativity and what is it for? And it seems as though creativity is also paramount to shifting where our communities go, how we can reimagine our lives and break out of existing systems.
And creativity is not just something where you draw pretty pictures, right? Or create a pretty website, but it is so, so important as a part of changing trajectories for communities. And I wanted to ask you just like, what were some things that come up for you, especially, uh, in talking about that as a, this aspect of creativity?
Lee-Sean Huang: Well, there’s a lot I can say about that, so I’m thinking about how to organize that a bit. The first thing I’ll say from the personal perspective is it’s actually taken me these 20 years to figure out how to connect my undergrad background in political science with design. I thought it was like, okay, I’m just taking like a, like a big pivot and just leaving that stuff behind.
But actually it’s been been cumulative and I’ve actually just been incorporating that into my design practice or kinda creating a hybrid practice. So that’s one thing of just like having a realization of that. For me personally, and my message for designers thinking about this is that we often think about design in terms of like pixel perfection or building products and all of these sort of things which are important on the craft side, but ultimately it’s about power, right?
In a capitalist context, it is about The return on investment for investors, for your company making profit and all of that sort of stuff. But that’s just one form of power. You can also think about building power in terms of what you enable your users as individuals or as members of communities, allowing them to do what is social media empowered in terms of people being able to build livelihoods or to create political movements, et cetera.
So there’s that part of it. And then also thinking about design as more than like a mirror that reflects, trends and things that are going on in our society. It’s both that and a map, right, in terms of a roadmap for where we can go. Uh, and so thinking about design as future making as well, which I think you’ve alluded to, is like we’re putting something out there at a product, a service, whatever that may be that didn’t exist before.
So how does that change the world? How does that create new forms of possibilities for people? So that’s kind of how I think about it personally and philosophically. And I’m happy to go down any of these other threads and examples if you want.
Steven Wakabayashi: Yeah, I think there’s so much to there. And I’m just curious, like which one out of all of ’em do you personally resonate with, especially at this moment of time in your life?
Lee-Sean Huang: I think in light of current events and also my recent experience with the strike and the contract negotiations at the new school, I’ve been thinking a lot about design education and the role of design educators. And what I mean by recent events is the Supreme Court cases in particular, the one striking down student loan relief, and the one striking down affirmative action.
And for me, as it relates to my corner of the world. Is design education and who gets to be a designer, right? Who gets to go to design school, but also who is teaching design school? And some of the issues in both the business model in terms of how we pay for it, how the people who teach are paid or how little we’re paid, as well as the mental model of how do we even think about college education, right?
How do we think about it as more than just like this individual good or investment in yourself, but something that’s collective and how does that open up different ways of thinking about how we finance it and how we value it as a society. So I’ve been thinking a lot about that, while still kind of working in an imperfect system, teaching as an adjunct because I wanna work with students and there are parts of it that do work, right, in terms of, uh, allowing me to be in the classroom and do what I like and having taught for more than a decade now, like I have former students who are now kind of professional peers. Being a part of that is, is also kind of amazing to be building out the, the next generation. So I think I’m, I’m thinking a lot about that as it relates to how we started this podcast talking about my, uh, mid-career crisis of sorts.
So that’s the positive end of things, but also seeing that, especially coming out of the strike last year that we won a battle. But there’s still very much, an uphill battle, I guess, or, or sort of, headwinds that we’re facing in terms of larger economic situation in terms of inflation and cost of living, but also the underlying business models that are still very imperfect as it relates to equity and and whatnot.
So yeah, happy to talk more about that, but I think that’s what I’ve been thinking about a lot.
Steven Wakabayashi: Yeah. And when you talk about representation, are there any specific communities that come to mind that should have a bigger seat, uh, in the design realm?
Lee-Sean Huang: Yeah, so at AIGA, we have done some polling in the past.
I think the last one was from 2019 and our design census. And we found that, uh, well, not surprisingly, design still tends to be overwhelmingly white even compared to the general population. I think Asian Americans. And this is without drilling down into what Asian American even means. Right? Which is also very diverse term.
But Asian Americans are slightly overrepresented. Uh, and then we know that black and Latino designers are highly underrepresented compared to the general population, uh, in the US of those, communities. So, That’s an issue. But then just kind of looking at my corner of things, what we see is that actually most of my students are Asian.
But they’re usually from Asia, whether they’re like from China or from Korea. They’re more likely to be from those places than from like Chinatown, even though I’ve taught in like downtown New York City, universities right. From Flushing or, or these other communities. So again, there’s all sorts of disambiguation we can do with some of these statistics, but that’s just to paint some broad brush strokes.
But if you look at who’s teaching design, that’s certainly not represented, right? I’ve had students say to me, it’s like, oh wow, you’re the first one of the first Asian professors I’ve had, in design school. So that’s certainly something that we could improve on as well. And that goes back to some of this business model of like adjunct teaching, right?
Which a lot of design schools depend on, I think in the ideal world scenario. It does make sense in terms of, okay, we want working professionals in design or other creative industries to teach part-time so students get like real life industry professionals in the classroom. Where this starts to break down is like one, just because you’re good at what you do in a creative field, in design or whatever else, doesn’t mean you’re a good teacher at that and there’s often not a whole lot of support for that. So there’s, there’s high turnover, right? Or people get busy with their primary careers and then they stop teaching, et cetera. In my case, because I was teaching before I became a designer, I was able to incorporate that, and I think that’s one of the reasons behind my longevity in teaching.
But the reality is that a lot of adjunct instructors in design and in other creative fields are depending on their teaching jobs to pay for their health insurance, to pay their rent, you know, while they’re trying to make their small businesses work. Whether it’s in fashion or graphic design or as performing artists and whatnot, which is a lot of my colleagues, when we were organizing our strike, their stories about how they handle things.
So in some, in some ways, I’m very privileged in that. Like, I don’t depend on teaching to pay for my health insurance or pay my bills. I do it because I want to. But I also think that we can’t just depend on people like me to teach, because that’s also an equity and diversity issue for our students, right?
We can’t just have the most privileged designers and creative professionals teaching students Cause that’s not a fair representation of what it’s like to be a designer or creative professional. And obviously there’s the, there’s gonna be like the gender and kind of racial ethnic biases built into that.
If we’re depending on just the most privileged designers who can afford to teach, doing that. And then if you go too far the other way of like having precarious teachers, then the education suffers as well in terms of like, we’re only paid by our contact hours or we were until our new contract. And what that means is it may look like we’re paid a lot on paper, like a $127, $135 per hour, but that’s just in classroom time, right?
You might spend like 10 hours outside of class, prepping for your lessons, grading student work, doing office hours, all of that is like, or was uncompensated time. So if you do the math, it ends up being like minimum wage work, for some people. And so what that means is if a student wants like some extra help with office hours, like sometimes the teachers are like, sorry, I can’t afford to meet with you.
Right? Or maybe they wouldn’t say that. So, uh, so straight up. But like that is a reality, right? And then the students are still paying like $50,000 a year to go to these, design schools. So that’s what I mean in terms of giving these concrete examples about the business model behind it and how a lot of it is run on, these myths that don’t necessarily reflect reality and our aspirations.
Steven Wakabayashi: Yeah, I think you touched on a lot of great points. What’s resonating most with me first is there’s broken systems in academia that we really need to challenge, especially with the contact hours or how teachers are being paid. It doesn’t feel as though you’re incentivizing good teaching or good curriculum creation or good interaction with students, right?
You’re almost incentivizing do the bare minimum, right? Because you’re gonna get still paid the same amount regardless. And along the lines of that, how often have we, right? Going back to, oh, you’re bringing a professional in. How often, you know, you and I, I’m sure we and everyone listening. You can name that boss, that colleague that you’re just like, yeah, I really struggled to work with you.
And uh, yeah. And I imagine them being a teacher. Right,
Lee-Sean Huang: totally. And it’s like, how did you get here? Yeah,
Steven Wakabayashi: Exactly and this whole concept of, you know, now it’s just a competition of different accolades or people who’ve done certain things, getting these position of teachership. And it just becomes a little bit contentious in terms of like, well, what are you really championing?
Right. And I think especially if we want to change the fundamental, the way that we’re bringing in, students bring in new concepts, so we also have to fundamentally change who’s doing the teaching too.
Lee-Sean Huang: Totally. 100% agree. Yeah.
Steven Wakabayashi: Also, I’ve had many conversations with other instructors too in the design industry, and a lot of the stuff that’s even codified right in the textbooks and the stuff that you’re teaching is very white, cis, Eurocentric perspectives of design.
And what’s so fascinating with even where I’m reading personally, a ton of books by other diverse BIPOC, queer BIPOC design authors is starting to understand creativity exists, whether we don’t want to acknowledge it or not, and that the process of thinking about creativity, solutioning, all this stuff has already been around native tribes, ancestral tribes, people from different nations and different places have had a way that they’re creating their own version of creativity, community organizing, problem solving, but we’re oftentimes, Leaning more towards a lot of these like white Eurocentric perspectives, that the craziest part was one of my, volunteers had put together a slide in teaching one of our curriculums.
And the intention wasn’t to point out what we were trying to do. We’re just like, oh, let’s just, you know, give honor to some of the people who set up the, you know, the realm of user experience. And when we saw all the faces on the slides we’re like, they all look the same,
Lee-Sean Huang: right?
Steven Wakabayashi: And we’re like, uh, I think we need to change the message of this slide.
Lee-Sean Huang: Yeah. I think there’s definitely work that needs to be done in terms of challenging. Yeah. These sort of like important historical figures and developments, whether it’s like the Bauhaus or how user experience design came about and like recognizing that history, but also recognizing that like these things that came out of a certain place and time and culture are not universal. Right. Um, and that even design as we know it. Right. And the quote unquote western context comes out of the industrial revolution. And this separation or this bifurcation, from like maybe traditional craft where the fashion designer was also making the dresses or the shoemaker was ma like designing the shoes and making them to now we have machines, or now we have assembly lines of people making things.
So like the planning is now separate from the making. Right. And so that’s one context, but then there’s design and like the most general human context, which is intentionally shaping our environment mm-hmm. To create some sort of desired result. Right. And from that, that connects to what you were mentioning before of like traditional cultures, indigenous cultures, all of these things that don’t have to be necessarily industrial or western, but are still very much design and how do we Yeah, yeah.
Recognize that and broaden the cannon, if you will, and recognize the sort of diversity within what design signifies.
Steven Wakabayashi: Absolutely. And it’s so fascinating too, where it’s just, I feel that. At least the Western lens. Community design is becoming a little bit more trendy over the past few years, but if you look at just like the way indigenous communities had co-created with one another and not even having specific territorial lines and this whole blurring of just like, what does even community mean?
We don’t realize so much innovation that we’ve actually lost. Mm-hmm. In only highlighting certain communities specifically why it cis Eurocentric perspectives as the champion. And so, at least for myself, in a lot of the work that I do, I’m always pushing for people to broaden their horizon. And what’s funny was, at one point in my career, I was all about, you know, naming these top companies and the design methodology that they had.
And now I’m like, whenever they come up, my skin just crawl. And yeah, I’m like, you know, let’s, let’s change even the wording or like how we’re honoring some of these practices and let’s move away from continuously highlighting certain organizations corporate structures of doing specific methodologies of design, but also just like Broadening it.
And I think it’s a big learning experience for especially I find people just entering the foray of design. Mm-hmm. Because you’re just like the allure of, oh, I want to be the very best. Right. You keep chasing after this goal, but I’m just curious, especially for folks who are in the creative realm, some of our listeners, in terms of just like taking some of the learnings and some of the things that have been a part of your journey of how do you create more equitable spaces, how you teach more equitably or creating more equitable results with equity centered design practices, what are some of your recommendation or tips of ways that people can approach their work or even just shift their thinking?
Lee-Sean Huang: Yeah, I guess I’ll give like a really tactical example cause I think it’s a way to be concrete, which is often we think about Workshops or co-design sessions as one of these kinda keystone touchpoints interactions within a community centered design process, right? So you have different stakeholders in the room, but I think the first point here is to like, just recognize the different power dynamics in that room, right?
So there may be people who have great ideas, but there’s already what I call the first filters. Like they don’t share those ideas because they don’t wanna be seen as like stupid or absurd or whatever by their peers, by their boss, whatever. So it’s like, okay, just because you have the diversity in the room doesn’t mean that these ideas are, available.
Or rather than like safe spaces. I like to talk about brave spaces, right? So how do you create a few ways is to think about the different ways that allow people to contribute at their best, right? And a lot of these. Formats, right, of like co-design or brainstorming, all of that. They tend to favor people who are like extroverted and quote unquote confident, which often means like dominant groups like tends to favor like white males who have advanced degrees.
Not all the time, but like that. That’s the sort of bias, right? Or that’s tipping the scale. So how do you bring in other ways for people to either contribute anonymously by maybe writing something down, putting it in a box, or even having like quiet time? Certainly with the normalization of more remote work because of the pandemic, that’s helped a little bit of like, okay, you don’t have to like physically write the post-it and then go up to the whiteboard, right?
It’s like it’s easier in like fig jam or mural or whatever to just like contribute that way without it being like, okay, you have to like put yourself out there physically to participate. So I think there’s technologies and ways of doing this through facilitation that allow like, Introverts, extroverts, people from different cultural backgrounds to participate.
And so it’s about challenging these defaults or having multiple pathways to participate. I think that’s my general and also very tactical advice that I would give for that.
Steven Wakabayashi: Yeah, and I, I think that’s so important, especially while you’re saying it’s like really tactical. I feel like oftentimes we’re trying a solution, and this isn’t really for just specifically design.
This is just like working too Totally. Right. Where I think oftentimes we’re also trying to think about the solution, but the reflection is before we get into the solution, who are we meeting with? Who are we working with? And one workshop that we’ve been doing also on our, my side is, Doing an assessment of just like, what are your own individual intersectional identities?
Mm-hmm. You know, what identities do you encompass? That’s visual, that’s invisible. And also doing an assessment of your team and using those as specific data points totally have you to analyze what you may be missing. And oftentimes, like the example is in tech, right? You might have diversity in skin tones, in diversity in gender, but when you look at, for example, socioeconomic status, everyone is pretty much at the same socioeconomic status, making the same decision.
More often decisions that affect people at a much lower socioeconomic status. And so it’s an interesting practice that I love that you just, um, center as a part of it, which is reflecting on just who’s having a discussion and who’s actually creating so that we can usher in new ideas and experiences.
Lee-Sean Huang: Totally. Yeah. And it’s also like when we think about service design and systems design in general, right? Who’s closest to these touch points? Who’s closest to these problems, right? And there’s only so much like undercover boss stuff that you can do, but it’s like, I mean, I’ll just use my own example of like adjunct professors, right?
Like we’re actually in the classroom, whereas these administrators often are not right? Or it’s been a long time since they’ve been in the classroom and they’re thinking more in terms of like Excel spreadsheets, right? And like abstractions rather than like, What actually works in the classroom. So there’s things like that as well of like who’s closest to something and how do we value that, even if they’re not at the top of these corporate, organizational pyramids.
Steven Wakabayashi: Yeah, and I’m curious if, just looking at the work that you’re doing and just being so open-minded and welcoming for other communities, I’m just curious if also your queer identity has played a role in just shaping the way you are starting to usher in some of these new experiences and ideas for yourself even.
Lee-Sean Huang: Totally. I think like, as it relates to like creativity and innovation, queerness is kind of a superpower. And I, I said that partially jokingly, and I’ll explain why. You know, like in on one side, I don’t want to sort of like exoticize, like the the creative queer person stereotype, right? But on the other there is something in terms of queerness as a political project, that is about challenging norms and like, quote unquote best practices of how we organize ourselves as a society, right? Or as a company at the micro level. And so that sort of norm challenging is essential to innovation. And I say this also just as a facilitator and a trainer, where I’ve been brought into companies who wanna learn how to be more innovative and learn design thinking.
And it’s, ok, well you can take this workshop with me and you can learn about some of these frameworks and some of these methods, but ultimately you have to change the culture and what you do, right? It’s like people want often the results of innovation, but they don’t want to do what it takes to be innovative in terms of like changing business as usual or being a little silly sometimes and kind of getting to that point.
Right? And I think you mentioned like intersectionality before, which again is one of those like super loaded buzzwords, but. What it means for me in this context too, is like being first generation Taiwanese American. And like even my Taiwanese side, like my dad’s family is Cantonese, and my grandparents were from China.
So like my family was already multicultural before we were American, like having come to the US four years old, like I speak English, like somebody who’s born in Arizona. So there’s like the sort of insider outsider kind of perspective where it’s like, Taiwanese people think I’m totally American, but then there’s still the like perpetual foreigner thing in America.
So there’s that part, but that’s also a superpower as it relates to queerness, right? Depending on passing in some cases, not passing in other context, but being able to understand that because oftentimes when we talk about norms and how you challenge norms, it’s like the water that we swim in as fish, right?
And to be like, I guess partially amphibian if you wanna work on this, uh, example, right? This, metaphor, it allows you to see, what these norms are so you can challenge them. So, yeah, lean into that.
Steven Wakabayashi: Wait, I, I’ve never actually heard that analogy, but I love it because what comes up for me is, is that quote, right, where it’s like, how do you explain water to a fish?
Mm-hmm. When that’s all they’ve been surrounded by. And this aspect of like being an amphibian or it’s just being queer. And also a book that comes up to mind, I don’t know if you’ve read it, but the Queer Art of Failure. Uh, amazing, amazing book, which is around queerness as failing hetero typical norms, right?
Meaning, and that in that it is a political movement. It is substantial for progress, for just diverse livelihoods, and the fact that there’s so much benefit from also not succeeding in a way that allows us to open our minds to what is actually in what we quote unquote identify as failure. It’s like a very meta conversation, but, and the book breaks it down really well.
But what I love is it’s, it’s the fact that the existence of queerness and being queer ultimately opens other people up to like a fish becoming an amphibian, just opening up to the possibilities of different livelihoods.
Lee-Sean Huang: Totally. That book is on my reading list, but I’ll have to bump it up, higher up, uh, for my summer reading.
Steven Wakabayashi: Yes. It’s so good. I was recommended from another person who’s just like very, very much into books and I was like, what is one book that you’d recommend? And they were like, Queer Art of Failure. And so, but I think it’s interesting too, right, the reframe of it’s embracing failure. Mm-hmm. Right? Because failure, right.
I’m sure you’ve also talked about this with your students where a lot of designers have perfectionism tendencies, right? Totally. You’re just like this vision that there is perfection when in reality perfect is so relative. What looks good to one may look different. I don’t wanna say awful, but different to another, and we put these scales of how we’re measuring success to, you know, certain individuals based on different constructs. And I think the more that I’ve been in this work, the more that I’m continuing to do design working with communities, the more that I realize that really, even when I hold certain forms of perfectionism, whether it’s within the work or within just even myself, that it’s an opportunity to also reflect what are things that I’m holding so tightly onto mm-hmm.
That I can maybe loosen myself with.
Lee-Sean Huang: And I think failure. There’s a whole discourse of failure in like startup culture and innovation culture as well. Right? About like fail faster and fail forward. Yeah. Yeah. Which is like, I mean, there’s like kind of a douchey side of that as well, which like also hides privilege in terms of like, who allowed to
Steven Wakabayashi: Move fast break things.
Lee-Sean Huang: Yeah. Yeah. It’s like who is allowed to fail? Or like, who are you breaking things for and what are the, uh, consequences? Mm-hmm. And accountability for that. I think the, this queer, uh, art of Failure has a different take on the idea of failure, but definitely see like some parallels here. Mm-hmm. But as it relates back to what we were talking about before in terms of like community centeredness, community centered creativity, community centered design, there’s also something about the iterative process, which is inherent to any creative process.
But when you’re designing together, right, it’s like, how do you say, share your sketches or share your your prototypes in a way, uh, that’s authentic and allows for participation rather than waiting until you have something that’s far more polished. Yes. Which like people are afraid to then mess with, right?
Yeah. Or the people who are willing to mess with those also are sort of biased towards certain dominant groups who will like, you know, be like, sure, I’m gonna like blow this up and you can start from scratch. But yeah. Uh, that, that’s also something to think about in terms of how imperfection is also an invitation for participation.
Steven Wakabayashi: Oh, I love that. Imperfection as an invitation for participation.
Lee-Sean Huang: There you go. There’s the tweet sent. Tweet a tweet. One of your 600 that you’re gonna get today.
Steven Wakabayashi: Yeah, exactly. Or the Twitter is just dumpster. I was like, I think Elon just instituted like you can only read up to a certain amount per day.
Lee-Sean Huang: Yeah.
Steven Wakabayashi: It’s, yeah. And I wanna touch on, one thing I just earmarked for myself was even going back to the, uh, Supreme Court decision, um, knocking down affirmative action. I’m just curious from your own perspective, why is affirmative action important?
Lee-Sean Huang: Yeah, I think part of it is about recognizing historical wrongs, as well as recognizing implicit biases.
And I’m not saying like the current models for admissions are good or can’t be iterated, iterated upon. Right. Obviously, dogfooding our own advice here, like, Yes. We need to like find ways to be more equitable. I mean, in terms of the case specifically, I’ve followed more of the Harvard one since that’s, where I went.
But like in the scheme of things, and I know there’s like attention to me saying this as a Harvard grad, but like in the scheme of things like Harvard doesn’t matter that much, right? Like they educate 2000, uh, well 2000 1st year students about just under 2000 are admitted each year. You know, so like in the scope of the country of like all college bound people and globally, like it’s a very small amount.
And yes, it’s like overrepresented in like the global elite, but I think the focus really, it’s like, yes, look, let’s, find ways to be more equitable, but also like at the community college and at the state school level, how do we increase excellence there or how do we increase even open enrollment, right?
Like I’ve, I started college at Arizona State University my first year as a freshman before I transferred to Harvard. And back then you like filled out your name on a Scantron form and basically if you like graduated from high school in Arizona, they let you in. Right. And like, so there’s something there too about like both open access, open enrollment, certainly for undergrads and just seeing if college is right for you.
And being given that chance as well as like making that affordable, right? So you can fail. It’s like maybe you try for a year, but you’re not like stuck with tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt, to try that out. Like how do we make it free? You’re low cost enough that people could try it, they can fail, they can see if that makes sense for them, or trade school makes sense for them or, or whatever makes sense for them, right?
And so like that’s where it’s actually important for more people than like, how do we diversify the elite 2000 kids who get into Harvard every year? Cause that’s a drop in the bucket in the scheme of things.
Steven Wakabayashi: Yeah, and I, I think this is really relevant to just the conversation we had about failure and this concept of perfectionism.
And I feel that the tool of affirmative action is just one of many different things, right? Even totally the way we can institutionalize affirmative action based on race, you can do it based on a whole variety of different attributes, right? And oftentimes, especially in both sides, very progressive or very far right leaning.
We have this notion that things have to be perfect for us to have a forward momentum. And what I am, you know, also personally disappointed by is this inability sometimes to see beyond things that might not be working a hundred percent in favor of completely abolishing that. So that, you know, it’s almost like this concept of all or nothing in this instance.
Lee-Sean Huang: Totally. Yeah. And I think there’s just some bad faith arguments behind it too, right? It’s like that sort of perfectionist culture, which I think is mm-hmm. Also on one of those lists of like, aspects of white supremacy culture. It’s like, okay. Like it’s not that most offenders of affirmative action think it’s a perfect system, but it’s like, okay, well how do we democratically build upon this Yeah.
And reform it in different situations, right? And I think I’m still waiting to hear like, what is the endpoint of this, right? For the people who supported abolishing affirmative action, if you look at Harvard, like, it’s already like between 25 and 30% of their entering freshman class is Asian or Asian American.
It’s already not representative of the US general population and, and maybe that’s okay, right? But this is where my sort of political philosophy background comes into. It’s like, okay, well what is merit? Right? Like we can’t just not. You have to like scratch at what merit means as well in terms of who creates these tests, who decided, what we’re testing on.
These things are not set in stone either. They’ve evolved with the times. They also represent, social, cultural, political biases and, and what not. Like you can’t just hide behind this monolith, mythical mythology of merit as this one thing too. So like that’s a whole thing we could make a whole podcast about.
Steven Wakabayashi: The word merit too, I think is so interesting because to certain people, different degrees of accomplishment means so different, right? Where you, you might have somebody coming from a very low resource community. And for them, getting an average SAT score is phenomenal. Right? Given the complete lack of resources, complete lack of support.
And I also went to high school with that at the time, had like very little resourcing in computer science, you know? Mm-hmm. And for anyone to have any skills in computer, it’s like phenomenal. And I think sometimes we forget that across the board, not everyone is resourced the same exact way across the board.
And so oftentimes trying to measure these merits, right. Totally. As almost like a snapshot at this moment. It is giving you a measurement of where just people are at currently, but it doesn’t even show you how far people have progressed, how hard people have worked, where I think a lot of people try to attribute the scores people get to labor and like people’s just effort, right? But that’s what I always say is I, I, especially when we take these test scores and these snapshots into ways that we’re just primarily measuring people, this is just a single snapshot. And then the last anecdote is, especially in running our bootcamp at QTBIPOC Design, we measure everyone across many, many different levels.
And this year we’re starting to include socioeconomic factors into it. And as a part of curating the students who go into our program, we also recognize what we have to look at some of these attributes so that we can make a fully inclusive, diverse class. And oftentimes. I think my last note I would add is I have a hunch that if you put a lot of the people who are pushing for so many of these decision things to be made actually in the driver’s seat.
Mm-hmm. Creating a classroom, trying to figure out how to institutionalize diversity and equity in their own accord. I think they’re gonna walk back on so many of these decisions that they’ve made themselves.
Lee-Sean Huang: Yeah. I think that’s the challenge, right? For the people who are like, okay, it’s a victory to get rid of affirmative action.
Now it’s an equal playing field, right? Mm-hmm. It’s like if you actually believe that, then what is your Yes. Political commitment to making it actually an equal playing field downstream. Like how do you make high schools across the country more equitable? How do you make junior highs elementary schools like access to pre-K even, right?
Yeah. Because if you, if you want to pretend that that’s equal, then like that, that’s a whole different problem. But if you recognize that that’s unequal, then let’s make college admissions equal, whatever you think merit is, but then what is the equal playing field before that?
Steven Wakabayashi: Absolutely.
Absolutely. Well said. And we’re getting towards the end of our podcast, and I just wanted to ask you, given just all the things that’s been happening for you and also. What’s happening in the world, the nation around us. What’s next for you?
Lee-Sean Huang: What is next for me? Because I have this like portfolio career between like teaching at AIGA and still doing some stuff, with fusA part-time.
I think coming up in the late summer fall, I’ve got like, basically like 20% of my time that was previously occupied, opening up. So I am trying to figure out how to fill that. And so I’m kinda keeping my, I guess, heart and mind open to that at the moment in terms of what I fill that with. I think one hunch I have beyond like kind of taking on more consulting work or something is to do some sort of project that is my own way of making, learning more accessible, whether it’s a new podcast or a YouTube thing, I like keep me accountable for this one.
Steven Wakabayashi: Oh, I will.
Lee-Sean Huang: We’ll see where we go. You know, I, I already teach students who pay a lot, or their families pay a lot, or they take out a lot of student loans to, to work with me. But there’s things that I can do that like scale, that are free. You know, if I make certain parts of my quote unquote content, which is a whole word that I, I think is, uh, kind of cringy, but like, for lack of a better one, like putting that out there.
And obviously there’s things that I do that are valuable that don’t scale in terms of one-on-one feedback and mentoring and all of that, but what can I scale and can I make that more available? I think that’s one hunch I have in terms of how I fill that upcoming 20% time. But also figuring out ways to plug that financial gap as well is something I’m trying to figure out.
So I think it’s balancing those things out in terms of my next steps.
Steven Wakabayashi: Yes. I can’t wait to see what comes up. I have no doubt you’ll, you’ll be able to figure out, something interesting to come of it and I just, I just love to, and I want to acknowledge just like it’s so beautiful to see your story of all these different things that you’ve been interested in your life previously, all kind of coming together.
Right, right. It’s like, yeah. All of these facets of your life in college abroad growing up and starting to culminate into this beautiful myriad of experiences that not only, you know, uplifts, this deeper inner desire, this like to create, but also helping other people. So just as another community practitioner, I wanna just like thank you, honor you and the awesome work that you’re doing and I think whatever you come to, I think it’s gonna be awesome.
Lee-Sean Huang: Well, thanks Steven for the encouragement and also for. Giving me the space and the platform to share today?
Steven Wakabayashi: Yes, yes. And what is one thing, especially for our listeners, that you want them to take away with from our conversation?
Lee-Sean Huang: I think one thing, I’ve already mentioned this, but I think it’s worth highlighting again, is design is ultimately about power, right?
There’s craft, there’s aesthetics, there’s beauty, all of these things. But it’s ultimately about how you empower yourself or your users or communities and thinking in terms of those ultimate ends as a level kind of zoomed out or beyond just the kind of craft and the qualities of things. I think that’s, where we’re gonna reach our full potential as a design community.
So I wanted to just highlight that as maybe my last word.
Steven Wakabayashi: That’s deep and for those listening, how can they find you?
Lee-Sean Huang: I am at Lee-Sean pretty much everywhere on the internet. Whether Instagram, Twitter, if that’s still around, well this is released. And LinkedIn, it’s L e e s e a n. So Lee, like Bruce Lee, Sean, like Sean Connery, with no hyphen.
My legal name has a hyphen, but my online persona does not have a hyphen.
Steven Wakabayashi: And if you want to learn more about our podcast, you could visit [email protected]. And if you really enjoyed our conversation, feel free to leave us a note on our website or leave us a review. We look through all of everyone’s comments.
And also, if you’re subscribed to our newsletter, feel free to just hit reply and if there’s any thanks or accolades that you wanna provide Lee-Sean, we always forward that over to our speakers as well. I think the conversation today has been just so fruitful. It’s just so heartwarming, and I think there’s been so many topics that are very pertinent to today’s society and just what a lot of people are experiencing. And so I thank you so much for this amazing conversation and hope to have you again soon in the future. And maybe we could reflect on like a year from now, where am I?
Lee-Sean Huang: Where is he now? Yeah,
Steven Wakabayashi: where is he now? And have we done anything with our world differently?
Lee-Sean Huang: Well, thanks again Steven, and thanks for listening everyone.
Made it all the way to the end.
Steven Wakabayashi: Yes. Thank you. And hope everyone can take care and, heed some awesome words of wisdom from Lee-Sean. And with that, we’ll chat with you
again later. Take care. Bye now.
Lee-Sean Huang: Bye.