put aside your gadgets and just think with your mind

It started Friday night. I left Atlanta for a week of vacation and self-imposed radio silence, flew across the country on a plane without wifi. Since then, I’ve made a deliberate effort to be out of touch. Not completely (that’s too hard, for those of you that know and appreciate my uberconnectedness), but enough to lose myself in the moment.

Bruce Mau says in Dinosaur Babies that sometimes you just need to put aside your gadgets. We tend to tie our productivity to our technology - just think what happens in the world when gmail goes down - but creativity is not device dependent. And periods of radio silence, times that bring us back in tune with the world around us, are invaluable.

I’ve spent the week hiking in Hollywood, surfing in Santa Monica, shopping in Beverly Hills, and wandering through Washington state. Tonight, my phone died for a few glorious hours, and all I had to get me through the evening was my camera. No notepad, no Macbook, no background music to accentuate the day’s events. Holding on to nothing, but coming away with so much.

And it was glorious.


Surfing in Santa Monica. That’s actually me.


Biking the Strand in Venice Beach.


A light that can reach it all.


Sunset in a city that I’m in love with.

defying expectation (why do engineers wear ugly clothes?)

This morning I checked into Hartsfield an hour before my flight. After finding a parking spot (which proved to be more difficult than you’d think), getting my baggage squared away (I’m carrying a Chatillon gage and some other assorted medical-devicey-things), and getting through security with time to spare, I found out my flight had been moved from the T-gates to concourse E. So, still with time to spare, I made my way to the other end of the airport, and to the gate with 15 minutes left, only to be told by a Delta gate agent that they had given my seat away and I couldn’t board.

Let me recap for a minute: I had time to check my bags, go through security, get through a gate change from one corner of the airport to the absolute farthest point, and still made it in time to see people on the jetway boarding the flight. And couldn’t get on.

So basically I spent the morning waiting in line, on the phone with Bard Travel, emailing Hertz, and dealing with the general annoyances of rebooking flights and cars to obscure cities and small airports.

OK, vent session over.

I also spent the morning people-watching at the world’s greatest airport. Over lunch, I met a man who runs a logistics company and he asked me, as most people do, what I do for a living. I told him I was an engineer, and he laughed. As most people do. He told me I didn’t look like an engineer.

This is not the first time I’ve heard this. Once, when Iris and I were at an ICU visit in Fort Lauderdale, the nurse told us that when he heard he would be hosting two engineers, he was expecting “two old white guys.”

We are about as far from two old white guys as you can get.

It doesn’t really faze me. Or at least, not any more. I’ve grown up doing things that people don’t expect. I grew up listening to emo and country.

With my dad (Happy Father’s Day!) on senior night at Parkview.
I was probably the first Indian cheerleader at Parkview High School. We’ll say that I was, because who even knows how we would every verify that. One time I skipped an AP Comparative Government exam to go shopping. I was Student Body President of a student body that is only 30% female. I get french manicures and operate heavy machinery.

OK, a Dremel isn’t heavy machinery, but I don’t have pictures of myself operating the band saw.
When Frank told me I didn’t look like an engineer I laughed. I told him sorry that I wasn’t wearing ugly clothes. I don’t know why engineers have a tendency to wear ugly clothes. If I were married, or wealthy enough to have my own photographer, I would post photos of outfits, like Anh does on 9to5chic. I love her, because she works in the old-boys-club of the medical device industry and makes it a point to not look frumpy or old fashioned.

I don’t know that we always realize how important our expectations are. Expectations color our perceptions, and no matter how unbiased we try to be, our perceptions shape our realities. This is especially true if you’re a woman working in a male-dominated industry. When men dress well for work, it’s seen as dressing well. When women dress well at work, it’s seen as trying to leverage their looks to get ahead in their careers. When I was at Georgia Tech, I would read blogs about the perception gap about women and men in high positions. I showed up to meetings in pants suits because I didn’t want my legs to communicate that I wasn’t capable of doing my job.

I did all my headshots in pants. No exceptions.
At some point in the past two years, I stopped caring. Not because I didn’t have to, but because, like Penelope says, I’m over it. Other people have fought that fight for me, and I can move on to bigger issues. Whether or not a man thinks I’m as intelligent and as capable of doing my job isn’t dictated by my hemline. I’ve proven my point.

And now I wear a skirt and heels to work almost every day.


Because there’s nothing wrong with wearing pretty clothes to the clinic or the lab.
I was going to make this a post about how unexpectedly nice the Delta agent who rebooked me was, but now I’m tired. And I’m on a flight to Manchester, NH and my bags are en route to Burlington, VT by way of JFK. And I haven’t figured out why engineers wear ugly clothes. And now this post is about me, pretty clothes, and how not to be afraid to tell someone that I’m good at something because I’m a girl.

I wish I remembered her name. I would write to Delta about how she was the third agent I talked to, and all of them acted like they were too busy to do the job of finding me a new flight. I defied her expectations and walked across two concourses to get to an open Delta desk. She defied my expectations too, and rebooked me without a fuss. 

i just bought a cheese plate on an airplane

… and the lady sitting next to me is looking at me like I’m crazy for pulling out my American Express to pay for food on an airplane (I had to write that sentence last because she’s taken to observing my screen with great care as I type).

Maybe it is crazy. I don’t know. Everyone I work with thinks that I live a ridiculous life. Rafting trips on weekends. Conference calls from ski slopes. It’ll change when you have a family, when you have kids, they tell me. But whatever. I spend money on things that matter to me. On my ideal life (of the moment). On gorgeous and satisfying experiences (which, by the way, make you so much happier than things).


A pretty incredible place to have a swim.


A pretty incredible place to have a conference call.

We tend to be attracted to people who are like us. We make friends who are like us. We also are influenced by the people who are around us, to a greater degree than we realize. I have friends who appreciate my love of experiences because they’re willing to participate in them with me.

So when we get together, we partake in amazing experiences. Money can’t buy happiness, but money can buy experiences that change your perspective and enrich your life.


At the National Mosque in Malaysia.


Holding a baby gator in the Bayou.

From the Tiffany What Makes Love True website (see tip #8):

Light the Candles.
Use the good china. And crystal.
When you are together put style in your life.
This is part of living well, together.

There’s so much design inspiration in a life well lived.


The floor of Auntie Nat’s Cafe in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

I’m living as close to my ideal life as I can. Putting style into my life. Living well. And happily eating my cheese plate.

options from awful to worse

Saw this at Hartsfield-Jackson earlier this evening:

I’m not sure which is worse….
Would you rather have your body imaged as if you were naked… or felt up?

I’ve had trouble writing lately. Lots of ideas, not enough clarity. I haven’t slept enough (not getting enough sleep is basically like being drunk, all the time). Off to sleep on another cross-country Delta flight…

i’m not sure what city i’ll wake up in on friday

Of all the posts I’ve written, the one that I’ve gotten the most emails, most comments, and most feedback on is the post about business travel. It’s interesting - I’m not a professional business traveler. I’m not a consultant (I’m not sure if those two are synonyms, but I do remember when I was little and someone asked me what my dad did, I told people he was a professional traveler).

Actually, my travel schedule - both business and personal - is the opposite of a consultant’s. It’s really erratic and pretty unpredictable. In the years since college, I’ve started traveling (usually alone, sometimes with friends or coworkers) at least once a month. It’s Wednesday, and I’m still not sure what city I’ll be in at the end of the week.


I think - think - that this is El Paso, Texas.

I think you can tell a lot about a person’s professional personality by the way they handle two things: email and travel. In terms of email, I’m a nazi. Almost nothing stays in my inbox for more than 48 hours - it gets read, sorted, forwarded, or otherwise dealt with. It’s a habit I developed in college, and I’ve found that it’s one of the most effective ways (for me) to get things dealt with.

Travel is a bit more complicated. I think if you travel often, the goal is less to maximize your time and more to make your life feel normal. I have a friend who dealt with a year of constantly being on the road at the age of 18 by playing putt-putt in every city he visited. My boss finds a bar in every airport he goes through. And I take pictures of my feet and read entertaining posts from Penelope’s blog about life-disguised-as-work-advice (which is true even for travel - people are more lost, both literally and figuratively, when their travel plans are their own doing).

I’m pretty sure this is why hotel loyalty programs were invented. Staying at the same hotel, or the same type of hotel, gives us a sense of normalcy. A sense of our stay not being so transient. When Kimpton calls me to greet me by name and give me information on a city two days before I arrive, I feel like someone knows my story and remembers that I was there.

If you look at my DISC profile, most of you could probably guess that I’m a classic “I”. I’m also a high “C”. Meaning, I prefer knowing to not knowing, and (some sort of) structure to waking up in a different city every week. I have to continually find ways to keep myself grounded when I don’t know where I’m going to be.

It’s hard to handle frequent, unpredictable travel with grace (one of the best ways to learn about someone is to travel with them to a place that neither of you have been before). Everyone has their own way of dealing - whether or not they check bags (I always do, even though I make sure it’s small enough to be a carry-on), what airlines and hotels they choose, which airports to connect through. But the more telling aspect of our personalities is how we deal with our bags being misplaced, or an incorrect hotel reservation, or what we do with our spare time in an unfamiliar place. It’s not an easy balance when you’re jet-lagged, drowning in email, and in a city far off the map that you’ve never seen before.

the lottery of birth

From getrichslowly:

As I’ve mentioned already, at times I felt guilty too. It’s hard not to feel guilty when you’re staying at a hotel where the average room runs $618 a night — and meanwhile, half a mile from this posh palace, men and women are scratching to make ends meet.


On the road outside of Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum.


Four miles from Dharavi, is the Intercontinental Grand Mumbai.

What is my moral obligation to these people? Do I have one? Should I feel guilty for spending money on tourism? Or, as our guides suggested, should I be comforted by the fact that I’m participating in a transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor? What productive ways can I help aside from just throwing money at the problem?

I don’t have answers to these questions. 

Ultimately, however, I’ve realized that guilt is not productive. Guilt doesn’t accomplish anything. I can’t change who I am or the circumstances I’ve been born into. I’ve made the most of what I have: I’ve been lucky, and I’ve worked hard to build upon that luck. I can’t change this, and I can’t regret it.Instead, I feel like it’s my responsibility to do something with this hand that I’ve been dealt. Do what? I don’t know — and I’m not sure I need to know right now. As I travel, I’m becoming more aware of the world around me, and I feel like maybe there’s something I can contribute to make it a better place. I’m not sure what that something is, but I’m willing to be patient until I discover it.

I could have been born to any family, anywhere in the world, under any set of circumstances. I could have been any Indian girl - one of 600 million others.

But I wasn’t. I was born to incredibly intelligent and educated parents. Who had families that supported them and career choices that made them successful, in today’s terms. Who left the country of their past in hope of a country that could change their futures.


A man sleeping on a makeshift cot placed on a pile of trash near Loni Road in Delhi.


The Bah’ai Lotus Temple is one of the biggest tourist attractions in Delhi.

In Warren Buffett’s words, I (like most of you) have won the lottery of birth. It’s an incredibly humbling thought. As he describes it, if just before your birth you were put in front of a barrel containing 6.8 billion balls, and you pick one ball - one ball that would determine your gender, your birthplace, your parents - that determined the circumstances of your life. If you had that chance, would you put your ball back in hopes of something better?

I know I wouldn’t. That’s the hand that I’ve been dealt. All I can do now is give something back for it.

designing around the generation gap, in goods and experiences

Last night, Rafael and I were marveling again at how little human interaction a business trip actually takes as we picked up our rental car at BWI. Everything was going smoothly - flight landed on time, bags arrived, the Hertz Gold Club had us listed on the billboard, and we were just talking about how an interaction-less culture means a higher bottom line for a company, when we discovered that they had given us a hybrid.


(Nissan Altima hybrid, courtesy of…)

Being the office treehugger, I of course was thrilled. I’ve driven a hybrid once before (the HS250, and while it’s not perfect and there are some peculiar styling details in the center console that I don’t adore, it’s still a great first stab at a luxury hybrid). Rafael, on the other hand, was not so excited. On normal days, he drives a C280 that was made in Germany and imported into the United States. He loves the feel of the road and the paradigm of driving for him is driven by lots of sounds and textures. It’s much harder for someone like that to get used to a car that is silent upon starting up. In fact, it took him three tries of pushing the On button to realize that the car was actually on, and in fact we were in a hybrid vehicle.

While we laughed about it on our drive to dinner (with Rafael nicknaming our Nissan Altima as “the sewing machine”), we started talking about how generational differences make for different user experiences. Like traveling for business without interacting with a single customer service representative, driving a hybrid is an experience tailored for a specific generation. My paradigm of driving has been developed over eight years, and has always involved one primary vehicle. My boss, on the other hand, has been driving for almost 30 years, and those layers of memories and thoughts toward the experience of being on the road shape his product preferences very strongly. Those paradigms are different; the things we value are different.

Back to business travel - I’m part of a generation that has always valued time as its most precious resource. Unlike baby boomers, who chase money after growing up in a relatively less well-off setting as their parents were still handicapped by the economic climate of the 30s when they were starting careers, and unlike Generation Xers, who chase family time after growing up never seeing their parents as they strived to fulfill their American Dream, we grew up overscheduled with ball games and tutoring and soccer practice and flute lessons.

So now, we don’t chase money. We want time. We want all of our time to count for something. We recognize that once it’s gone, we can’t make more. And that says something about why we flock to things like climate change and public health. We have a defined amount of time on earth to tackle these problems.

The culture of business travel is ok for Generation Y, because things that are designed to automate the process also take us less time to accomplish. The culture of business travel is also ok for the Baby Boomers, because they value money. But Generation X traditionally values interaction.

So what does that mean for a user experience designer? How do you design for people who have very different paradigms of how the world should be? The user preferences aren’t always the same. In some cases, the end goals aren’t even the same. It’s not always practical to design different experiences for each of those groups. How do you make sure you’ve identified with one without alienating the others?

One man’s dream car is another man’s sewing machine.

happy election day (it’s a post about Halo)

Three months ago, despite the warnings and news stories, I took a trip to our manufacturing facility in Cuidad Juarez. Let me tell you, it was a surreal experience. Mexico is very much a developing country, and it doesn’t look much different from India (with fewer people, more paved roads, and no random animals walking the streets). Border towns in Mexico are regularly patrolled by armed National Police standing in the backs of jeeps. As one of my friends described it, the border security in Mexico is like seeing a live game of Halo.


Zaragoza land bridge in El Paso, Texas/Juarez, Mexico.

Over the weekend, two Americans were killed on the land border bridge we crossed to get back into the States – the Zaragoza International Bridge. A third was killed in the city itself.

It’s sad to see a city, and really, a country, be consumed by this kind of violence. We don’t often think of Mexico as a developing country, but it’s not that far off. Juarez is one of a string of maquiladoras that’s been affected by drug violence. I have to wonder how long American companies can continue their operations in Mexico (which offers significantly lower labor costs for labor-intensive manufacturing operations). Many have already left. For the 1.3 million Mexicans that are employed by these maquila factories, a plant closure has a devastating effect on their well-being and empowerment.

A lack of empowerment, and still, voter turnout remains lower in the United States than in Mexico.


The American flag, as seen from the Zaragoza bridge.

It’s an election day to count our blessings.

surprise & delight, and the story of lexus

Today, I was driving down I-20 on my way home from work, and the 18-wheeler in front of me had a tire explode. This isn’t the first time I’ve had a run-in with rogue tire treads - two months ago, a flying tire tread knocked my side mirror out of its position. In fact, when you have a 35-mile commute each way down a highway known to be a tire graveyard, you know it’s only a matter of time before you’re the unfortunate victim of a flyaway tire.


(photo courtesy of…)

It’s in situations like this that I really appreciate my car. I drive a 2002 Lexus ES 300 - a grandmother’s car, although I’m pretty sure that neither of my Indian grandmothers ever had a drivers’ license - a hand-me-down from my father that’s been through 8 years of everything that Atlanta driving has to offer. The more I drive and the more I design. the more I appreciate the thought that goes into Lexus’s design choices. There are few companies that I respect more (Apple being another, for their superb focus on design intent). Lexus stands out for a few different reasons:

1. Lexus doesn’t engineer cars. They engineer experiences. There is an R&D director that I work with that talks often about the principle of “surprise & delight” - that is, not just meeting design requirements, but exceeding expectations. Surprise & delight is about understanding your design intent, about taking care of tasks that your user didn’t even realize they were trying to accomplish.

So they employ hundreds of human factors engineers to study how people interact with their cars. The company understands very well that what people need out of a car isn’t the maximum amount of horsepower or payload. People buy cars for the experience of driving. Lexus doesn’t focus on features - sure, they have beautiful interiors, state of the art navigation systems, and a thousand other features. But when that tire tread blew up in my face, what I noticed wasn’t the automatic stability control that kicked in - it was that I heard only a muted pop in place of a loud bang. The environment inside my car stayed calm, even when my heart skipped a beat.

2. Consumers are far more mature in the car-buying market than they are in other consumer goods. No one tells me to buy a compact hybrid when what I really need is a pickup truck (but lots of people will tell me that I need a Macbook Pro over a Macbook Air). We understand our needs far better in automobiles than we do other things. And that’s why Lexus is so successful - they know they can engineer the experience of driving because it’s something that people understand very well.

I know how to check my gauges and change my tires, but even the engineer in me doesn’t crave horsepower over simple creature comforts.

3. They anticipate how the driving experience should be - from start to finish. Lexus makes sure that at no point in my driving life, I drive anything other than a Lexus. From the showroom to the test drive to routine maintenance visits in which I get a Lexus courtesy car and free gas, the company always has their best foot forward to make things easy for a customer. Sure, they may lose a little bit of money filling the tank back up for you after you’ve spent the day cruising around in one of their new models while getting your timing belt replaced, but they more than make up for it in loyalty when you buy your next car.

business travel is about being ok with being alone

I woke up this morning at 4:30 AM to find my hotel bill slipped under my door with a note that said “Thanks for staying with us - please leave your key in your room!” I marveled then, as I have for the past two days, about how the entire hospitality industry has designed itself for business travel. But as I got on the plane this morning and was catching up on emails and articles, I read this Penelope Trunk piece that resonated with me about being lost.

I am feeling lost. Maybe not completely lost. But at least a little. I’ve had some big conversations over the past three months. I’ve been pushed to a lot of limits. I’m still figuring out what all of it means in the context of my work and my life. To be fair, my work is my life. And I’m not complaining. I genuinely like what I do, both in the office and outside of it. We are lucky if we have work that is both meaningful and challenging to a manageable capacity. I find meaning in what I do, and I am challenged by it (some days, more than others).

Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I drove to a restaurant and asked for a table for one. I made it a point to not have a single telephone conversation through my entire meal (Greg, I promise, I really didn’t). I wanted to focus on the silence, on my own thoughts and how I would interact with my environment. More than myself, though, I was baffled with the ease that the waitstaff handled the situation.

It’s amazing to me that the entire hospitality industry operates on two modes - family travel and business travel. As someone who traveled with my family a lot as a child, I never understood (or had any visibility into) how things are designed for business. Anyone who has spent an appreciable amount of time on business trips - both alone and with coworkers - can appreciate this. From the time I checked into my flight (online), dropped my bag off, went through security at Hartsfield, got on the plane, landed in Manchester, picked my bag up, rented a car, and checked into my hotel, I spent maybe 6 and a half minutes talking to someone.

Business travel is about making things faster. And the way to make things faster is to automate. It’s the culture of business, translated into the culture of hospitality. To check out of my hotel or return my rental car, I didn’t need to talk to anyone at all. Which is fine, at 6 AM, when I’m barely functional anyway, but still remarkable. I’m not sure that I want that culture to dominate my life. So I need to reevaluate my work being my life.

Traveling alone for business is so transient. There’s nothing, except well-documented American Express bills, to remind people that you were there. There’s so little interaction between people. It’s kind of disconcerting, the fleeting nature of it all. Yesterday’s experiment at lunch was a good learning experience in how I deal with being in social situations alone. But it was a more powerful reminder that we are social people, and we need interaction to be grounded and un-lost. It’s hard to feel grounded when the culture of business takes over your life.

One of the things that I do when I travel is take pictures of my feet. I started a few years ago, in 2007, to focus my camera when I had multiple focal distances I was shooting. I used to post the pictures with the caption “I was here.” Over time, through long trips and short ones, I’ve started doing it to ground myself - literally. So here’s my shot from Manchester, NH this morning.


Manchester, New Hampshire - I was here.

So here’s my attempt at un-lost, for now. I write. I take pictures of my feet. I try new things. I make the flight attendant take the banana from my breakfast tray away. And I admit to myself that while maybe I can handle eating lunch alone, I’ll call my coworkers when I get back to the office and make some Amici plans.

i’m watching lightning from my window seat

Flying from ATL to ELP this evening, and got a glimpse of lightning forming out my window. By the time I started taking pictures, the real bolts were hidden behind clouds, but here’s some shots courtesy of my lowly (lovely?) iPhone 3GS and a GoGo inflight connection:

(all photos are personal… feel free to use these though)






Art & science. The stuff that dreams are made of. And also just stuff. Beautiful. 

Ok seriously, how awesome is the flat world we live in where I can check my Buzz feed, see Gary’s post on lightning formation, look out the window of an airplane and see it in real-time, and send this out?

don’t put your life on hold while you travel

The worst way to grow from a blog is to neglect it for weeks at a time. The past three weeks have been full of ignoring my blog. Mostly, I’ve spent a lot of time traveling, and the weeks that I’m not traveling have been taken up by races, weddings, work, and the epiphanies of everyday life.

I’ve always enjoyed travel. When I was a child, we were lucky enough to spend time traveling with my dad when he had conferences or guest professorships in Europe. In fact, we spent a few summers living in Linz, Austria – where I developed my appreciation for town squares and discovered my lack of affection for spoken German. I’ve been from the Straits of Malacca to the Taj Mahal, and until recently, I’ve never had a problem maintaining my life while on the road.

But these past few months have been crazier than most, and because of it, I realize that my travel schedule has taken over my life. When I’m on the road, I’m constantly moving from city to city, as most of my trips aren’t long enough to spend more than a few nights in one place. When I’m home, I’m preparing for the next trip while taking care of things that can only be done at home.

I once read that your life can’t be put on hold while you travel, and I’m now understanding what that means. I don’t do a great job of hitting the gym or creating new designs or coming up with intelligent blog posts when I’m away from home. Although those are things that I really value, I let those things be interrupted by my weekends (and weeks) away. I never feel like I have enough time to do them perfectly, so I end up  not doing them at all.

So I’m trying to do better. What travel is good for, at least for me, is exposure to new ideas and some downtime to think about them (essential for ENFJ types to grow). So here’s a thought to grow on from my recent travels – this weekend, I went on a hike to the Seven Sisters waterfalls in Palm Springs Indian Canyons. At the top of the canyon, we jumped into a snow-melt waterfall that was just a few degrees above freezing. I tried to toe my way in the water and just couldn’t bring myself to fully submerge in the pool (submersion in cold water makes your peripheral vessels constrict and your blood pressure skyrocket). Finally, our guide, Jason, pulled me into the water and dragged me, kicking and screaming, under the waterfall.

And you know what? It all ended up just fine.

(
(photo courtesy of Jason Bruecks… that water was colder than it looks!)

Sometimes, you just have to dive in headfirst and not worry about how you’ll feel afterwards. Sometimes, you have to squeeze in your two-mile run on the treadmill instead of the full 10k, because doing something imperfectly is better than doing nothing at all. Not all posts have to be perfect, not all thoughts fully baked. That’s what my travel schedule has taught me this week.

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