Books to get:
79 Short Essays on Design by Michael Bierut.
Graphic Design: A User’s Manual by Adrian Shaughnessy.

Readings:
“Design thinking = how designers think” – Warren Berger at the FUSE 2010 conference.
Tyler Brûlé’s weekly Fast Lane column.
Michael Beirut at Design Observer.

Overdosing on:
Earl Grey tea.

Trying to:
Get past the failures.

I learned:
Things do not get easier when we get older.

Pic above by Unit Editions

I grew up in an unconventional household. Most furniture in our (now old) home were mostly custom made – we never had a sofa (even in our current home). I loved my old house I grew up in.

My parents had stacks of design books, letrasets, art and design tools around the house.

I grew up in a very artistic background…and my sister and I grew up really ‘westernized’ – we watched Western cartoons, tv shows, sitcoms, movies (Tom & Jerry, F.R.I.E.N.D.S, Beverly Hills 90210, etc)…we read Western books (Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, Christopher Pike, etc); we grew up eating pasta, M&Ms, McDonalds, etc – and we spoke mostly in English to friends and family, occasionally in Chinese Cantonese but very minimal.

That’s just a handful and on top of my head, the things we grew up with.

In short, we were brought up 90% Western-influenced, 10% Chinese-influenced.

I never really felt I fit in to my surroundings early on in life. It never really bothered me that much, until a couple of years ago and most recently.

With all these things in between here and there happening in and around my country, I don’t feel like I belong here. There’s too many things to describe, and I will spare myself the agony and depression of writing them, but I know for sure I have had enough of all of this.

It’s time for a change.