From No Design and London to AI communities, a look back at the paths I took through my early to mid-twenties.
While organising the closing materials for the YLL Project, the most time-consuming part turned out to be retracing the story in chronological order.
When I proposed my give-back project in 2022, I wanted to continue No Design, the organisation I had founded at university. The plan was to build a student project team, run workshops with industry mentors, publish a white paper, and offer one-to-one guidance. I wanted students outside design programmes to learn how to define problems, work across disciplines, and turn ideas into something real through live projects. Four years later, the student team had not continued in the way I had imagined, and the overseas internship I had envisioned never happened. The white paper grew into a community event playbook instead, and its audience moved from interdisciplinary students on campus to people working across design, AI tools, and developer communities.
Compared with the original roadmap, the project had travelled far off course. Yet the form kept changing while the original question remained. Across the six years since university, I keep circling back to the same thing: how does a person recognise where their passion lies, set out on an unfamiliar path, and keep shaping themselves along the way?
Recognising what I wanted
In my third and fourth years at university, I did not really know what I wanted to do after graduation.
I took many courses at NTU D-School, joined internships, worked on client projects, and participated in communities. I looked for my idea of design outside the business school. No single experience suddenly gave me an answer. Each attempt felt more like putting a check or an uncheck beside a possibility. Some made me want to move closer; others made me realise that perhaps I only liked the version I had encountered in a classroom.
Many of my peers were following clear and dependable paths. Consulting, finance, and management associate programmes came with relatively legible recruiting seasons, job titles, and promotion ladders. I knew early on that I did not want to step straight onto one of them. The problem was that I knew what I did not want, but still could not articulate what I did.
Much of my fascination with design at the time came from the UK: policy design, public services, and the ways design thinking could enter governments and organisations, making “design” a way of intervening in complex problems. London gave this vague outline a concrete form. It had mature design agencies and places where design took part in public issues and organisational change. I still did not know what kind of design I wanted to practise, but I wanted to see what would happen when these methods entered the real world.
No Design grew out of that desire.
The name was literal. If no single department at the university could contain everything we wanted to learn, could we build an entry point ourselves? We brought students from different disciplines together to receive briefs, break down problems, and communicate with partners, filling gaps in our knowledge under the pressure of delivery. We started by doing, then used the process to understand what we still lacked. That was my earliest understanding of learning by doing.
What stayed with me longest was a new understanding of community. A community is a network of relationships formed around shared problems and mutual support. Working together builds trust, and trust opens the next opportunity to collaborate. I also began to notice how often I paid attention to what a teammate had left unsaid: what was really blocking them, how far their current work was from where they wanted to go, and whether I knew a person or resource that could help bridge the gap. Reading needs, renaming problems, and connecting people would recur in many forms of work later on.
No Design also confronted me early with one of my blind spots. I wanted the brand to grow, and I enjoyed being seen as its founder. Yet the desire to build a personal brand and the mission of a community are not interchangeable. When the two are held too closely together, the community can easily become a stage built to serve its founder. After No Design paused, I did not rush to restart it. It remains in a place that still feels beautiful to me; its mission for that stage had been completed. If I ever build it again, I hope I can distinguish which needs belong to the community and which come from my own desire to be seen.
Checking and unchecking along the way
Graduation did not feel like a dramatic dividing line. Many people may reflect on a change in their lives around the ceremony; what I felt instead was the bewilderment of something stopping mid-sentence. In the summer of my final year, I began a B2B marketing internship at Oursky. I moved into a full-time contract role after completing graduation formalities, then started military service the following January. The army, moving abroad, and work were already in the calendar. That period felt more like carrying out a set of arrangements one by one.
I still remember the desk outside the cat room on the second floor of the old office. Phillip opened a very long slide deck and walked me through the fundamentals of marketing. It was the first moment in my career when I thought, “Ah, so this is what work is like.” The details of the slides have long faded, but the scene has stayed with me.
At Oursky, I began asking the same questions repeatedly. Who is this article for? Why are we publishing it now? What will we observe afterwards? Content became one part of a funnel, connected to search intent, product positioning, and the sales process.
It took years for that experience to gather into a complete shape. When I encountered content design and UX writing, I saw the relationship between content and experience design again. Later, when I became responsible for product content, performance, and business goals myself, I learned that even a thorough article may simply spin in place if it is disconnected from its reader and their next action. Fundamentals often work like this: you think you understand them while learning, then take responsibility for the outcome from a different position and realise you had only seen the surface.
At Revere, we were building a digital memorial product from scratch and preparing to bring it to a funeral industry convention in the US three months later. Working alongside the CEO, Jess, meant touching the product, budget, patents, factory prototypes, international logistics, and cross-functional coordination. When everything competed for attention, prioritisation determined whether the team could move: what had to start now and what could wait; what I could decide and what I needed to hold until Jess and I could settle it together the next day.
Jess remains one of the people whose way of working I respect most. She could break goals into a spreadsheet, map a timeline, and distinguish the person responsible for a task from the person tracking it. What I wanted to learn most was how she brought quality into every small decision.
Quality does not emerge from saying “make it better.” It comes from taste built over time, the ability to notice details, and the capacity to translate a standard into something a team can execute.
Working with her was also the first time I understood why clear boundaries create a sense of safety. I could tell her frankly that something felt odd and that I was unsure how to proceed. She would offer a judgement clear enough for me to keep moving. Good leadership creates boundaries within ambiguity, allowing a team to take responsibility for their own decisions with confidence.
Revere did not reach mass production. The existing systems, departmental politics, and competing interests of a traditional organisation eventually overpowered the attempt to innovate. I had focused on execution without spending enough time building cross-functional relationships, assuming that doing the work well would be enough. I later learned that, inside a politically complex organisation, helping people understand what you are doing and why you are doing it is part of the work itself.
When methods met the real world
During my first three months at the Royal College of Art, I was absorbing almost everything: what the UK was, what the RCA was, and how service design was understood there. I had already encountered design thinking, service blueprints, and many theoretical frameworks in Taiwan. The challenges London brought sat beyond the tools.
The first friction was language. My English was sufficient for daily life and classes, but it was not yet natural enough to carry a high-cognitive-load discussion without resistance. I had to form a judgement in Chinese first, then translate it into English. By the time I spoke, the group conversation might already have moved on. Language directly changed how quickly a person could participate in collective work and whether they could defend a judgement in the moment.
Another friction came from understanding the standard for what counted as “good”. In a cross-cultural group, everyone carried different expectations about responsibility, work ethic, and the quality of a deliverable. We could share tools and all draw a journey map or service blueprint, but that did not mean we agreed on how far something needed to go before it was finished. Some people cared whether it truly addressed the problem; others felt meeting the course requirements was sufficient. At times, an idea sounded beautiful, but the thing we made could not support the claim behind it.
That experience changed how I understood service design. It gradually became a way of seeing problems: when facing ambiguity, look at how people, contexts, processes, and institutions shape one another. A method will not create a shared quality standard for a team, nor will it erase the power and cultural differences within collaboration. Tools can help describe a problem. How a group of people does good work together still has to be handled in the room.
After graduation, I did not treat “service designer” as the only destination. I carried this way of looking at problems into environments closer to products and with faster cycles of iteration. Content marketing required me to understand the reader and the purpose. Product work required me to handle priorities and organisational constraints. Community events forced me to make decisions in the moment: when the existing process is insufficient, which person and which problem need attention first?
The student community team founded during my time at the RCA was eventually handed to the next cohort. I also joined Service Lab London and helped sustain the community with other organisers. These experiences changed my understanding of an outcome. I used to see “I am still the person doing it” as proof of commitment. I later learned that perhaps the essence of infrastructure is that someone else can carry it after I leave.
The translator role I keep returning to
After returning to Taiwan, AI coding, automation, and a new generation of developer tools quickly entered product work. I began participating in workshops around Vibe Coding, n8n, Cursor, and communities connecting designers and developers. On the surface, I had moved from service design into technical communities. The work itself felt familiar: translating the language of one profession into an entry point another group could use.
After one workshop, an experienced designer said it was the first time deployment had not felt so frightening.
The comment stayed with me because it captured where the tools had changed. People without engineering backgrounds can now build websites, prototypes, and automated workflows in far less time. They can even put a functioning product online. The distance to the starting line has shortened. How to break down a requirement, whether data can be given to a model, whether the output is trustworthy, and when to ask a professional engineer still require human judgement.
“Empowerment” is not a lightweight idea. Pressing a deploy button remains some distance from being able to take responsibility for a product. AI can generate content quickly, but quality does not appear on its own. Tools give more people the opportunity to start. Communities need to support the judgement, mutual aid, and feedback that come afterwards.
The playbook produced at the end of this project is not meant to teach someone how to copy a particular event. It organises how to define an event, assign an owner, design how people move through the space, and decide what to do next when something goes wrong. I once imagined a white paper as the endpoint of knowledge. Now I prefer to think of it as a decision cache: a record of choices made and mistakes encountered, so that the next person does not have to begin from zero and can still make their own version.
If I remove the titles of designer, marketer, product practitioner, writer, and community organiser, I would call myself a translator. I move repeatedly between market information, a team’s product knowledge, the languages of different professions, and executable action. The work goes beyond passing information along. It requires judging what the other person needs, what the team can currently do, and why the work is worth doing.
The role also carries a cost. When I see a gap with no one taking responsibility for it, I tend to fill it first. If the goal, priorities, and boundaries of responsibility have not been made clear, I enter a familiar tension: if I do nothing, perhaps no one will; if I act, I am unsure whether I have crossed the boundary of what I should own.
My recent product marketing work has enlarged this question. To decide which channel deserves the next investment, I need to understand where revenue comes from. Once I begin attribution work, I cannot stop at organising data. I have to form an insight from it, then turn that insight into a decision. Analysis, planning, and execution all require time. If a strategic question has no clear owner, filling the gap gradually becomes a responsibility without an end.
I used to think I needed more ownership. Now I can say more precisely that I need the conditions in which ownership can be carried.
Those conditions include a clear goal, decision boundaries, someone to ask for help, and a shared standard of quality within the team. Without them, autonomy can easily become one individual paying for an organisation’s uncertainty.
From growth to validation
Service design mostly gave me qualitative methods. My current work forces me to handle data, attribution, and commercial judgement. There is still a great deal I have not mapped between the two, and I have not found a final job title. Even so, what I want to fill in next is becoming clearer.
In the short term, I will remain a generalist while developing a more distinct vertical specialism within marketing. I want to cultivate a data instinct: when I see several sets of numbers, I want to recognise what they might add up to and how they relate to a marketing or product decision the team is making. This intuition cannot be gained through reading alone. I have to work with trackers, attribution, and results. I also have to make the mistakes of treating correlation as causation and running attempts that cannot be proven.
Over the next year, I want to run more small, evidence-driven experiments. Each action should begin with a clear hypothesis, metric, and way of looking back, so I know what worked and what did not, including why it did not. I also want to return to deep long-tail content, SEO, and engagement content. These are the marketing foundations I built earliest and know most steadily. New tools can extend what I already know and help bridge gaps in my knowledge, but they cannot replace the accumulation of fundamentals.
Writing also needs to return to everyday life. After I stop publishing for a while, my feeling for language, my observations, and my ability to articulate a contradiction all recede. Writing forces a vague feeling in my head into a sentence that can be examined. When the sentence cannot stand, the thought usually cannot stand yet either.
I still care about revenue, users, and efficiency, and I understand that work has to be finished within a deadline. I do not want to be pushed along indefinitely by the urgency of start-up culture to chase numbers, tools, and faster output. When AI can generate content and products at scale, the questions of where the review standard sits and who is responsible for maintaining it become more important. Quality asks us to take responsibility for every small decision; it cannot wait until the pace slows down.
Looking back, the original project did not follow its proposal. No Design did not become a long-running student project team. The consulting internship I had imagined did not happen. Service design did not become the only answer to my career. What remains is a way of working that has gradually taken shape: start from a real problem, make it possible for people from different professions to work together, leave methods in a form someone else can carry, and be honest about which outcomes do not belong to me.
For several years, I understood my choices through “growth”: could the community become bigger, could my work move upwards, could content bring in larger numbers, and could I become a certain kind of person faster? Yet as I ask one layer deeper after another, validation sits underneath growth. I am validating whether the user need I imagined exists, whether a method remains effective after entering an organisation, and whether the way of working I want to move towards can give me a life I can stand within.
In the last stage, community gave me a great deal of energy and drove me to complete things I had never imagined I could do. As the project comes to an end, I hope to look back and examine the choices I made along the way, then carry the answers that have survived that examination into the next stage.