Kalina Yang • A second-year MS Design student shares her Personal Statement project.
 

Every year, students develop a Personal Statement: a work that uniquely represents who they are. They then share this work with the rest of the design community on a special Personal Statements Night. This project allows the designers to combine a physical product that is imbued with their emotions and values with a shared user experience.

Flavor as a Function of Time by Kalina Yang

During my studies as a mechanical engineering major in undergrad, I found design as a useful and complementary skillset. This led me to pursue and complete a minor in Experience Design. While I continued on to work as an engineer in the renewable energy space, that initial interest never left me.

As an early engineer at Form Energy, a startup working on designing a new class of battery energy storage to increase renewable energy reliability, I found so much fulfillment in my role on the product team. For this design work, everything I did was the convergence of many competing stakeholder priorities and needs across the company—from people whose jobs it was to care about cost, reliability, performance, ease of assembly, and so on. Besides the technical nature of my role, I was surprised by how much I liked the reconciliation process of aligning teams around my released design. I really found my professional voice in these conversations—building trust with others to understand the core of everyone’s desires for the product to move forward the mission we all cared about so much.

This is the part of design that brought me back to school and the reason I chose the human behavior and multi-stakeholder track in the MS Design curriculum. I wanted to pursue my interest in design from undergrad while leaning into this new interest in understanding, analyzing, and realizing people's needs.

At the risk of sounding dramatic, I think I will always say that coming to Stanford was the best decision I’ve ever made. My life has felt so expansive in this program—here, I can follow the thread of every new interest I find. But the one constant has been the people. Growing, learning, and hanging out with my cohort has been at the core of this experience, and as I leave Stanford in June these friendships will be the most precious thing I take with me.

Personal Statement: Flavor as a Function of Time

When we were asked to create a piece of work representing ourselves as designers, I initially thought about my time working in energy, but then I quickly knew that this work would need to be about my connection to food. Food is one of my life passions and the way I show care for others. 

And I wanted to express this in my personal statement through functional ceramics—aka by creating vessels that highlight the power of food for creating community.

Thrown ceramics is a medium that gives me access to a state of flow. I’ve also found that while the individual, focused experience of making acts as fuel for my natural introversion, the end product is a way I can connect with friends and family. I wanted my personal statement to reflect this aspect of food: its ability to marry individual and communal rituals in a single experience.

Inspiration: Flavor of Life

For Personal Statements, I wanted to go big (since I couldn’t go home). I generally am pretty risk-averse when I throw, and I wanted to release myself from that pressure of perfection by committing to throwing 100 tea cups—more pieces than I’ve ever made in my last three years as a hobbyist ceramist. I also knew that Personal Statements Night brings in a lot of guests, and I wanted to be able to engage with everyone–and what better way than by serving something out of the cups themselves?

I thought soup would be a little more quirky and unexpected than tea, so I decided to make a simple miso soup that could be sipped. Visitors walked through, interacted with the cups, and got to pick their favorite to sip from.

I drew the title inspiration for my piece from a book that I had read recently - Inciting Joy by Ross Gay. In it I found the quote “flavor is a function of time” attributed to the writer Patrick Rosal. I liked this as a way to describe the way I’ve invested my own time in this program in the “flavor” of life—spending time learning, hanging with loved ones, laughing, cooking, and creating projects that bring me joy.

Impact: The Practice of Making Space for the Unexpected

I am really happy and proud of the way the piece came out. It was super interesting to see which cups different people gravitated towards, and fun for me to see which ones my friends picked up compared to the ones I had imagined for them. This piece has now had a second life outside of Stanford, as part of the Forming Function exhibition at Palo Alto Art Center. I got to see my work in conversation with other functional ceramic artists and how it could resonate with people beyond my immediate circle.

Reflecting back, I think my biggest learning from this process will be the value of focusing on creating freely, without getting too attached to a certain outcome. Rather than the pursuit of the single perfect cup, I set my intention to create a hundred cups while being open to mistakes and imperfection along the way. Focusing on practice and leaving space for the unexpected are two values I hope to take forward in my design work after the program.

As I leave Stanford, I’m trying to find ways to preserve the best parts of being here—being open to new things and experiences, meeting new people, and building close relationships. I am also on the hunt for a mission-driven job where a people-first mechanical design engineer would fit the bill.