Last time, I started a recipe manager as a small exercise that turned into an actual prototype after a few iterations. However, I felt I was relying on Claude for doing most of the planning apart from the coding. The other part was after validating the app, I wasn’t sure about the next direction. It didn’t feel right to publish a project I hardly knew except for the idea. So I started to look into methods of building an app and stumbled on Manyfast.

I see so much content revolving around getting better. Sounds good on the surface, but I'm talking about writing or should I say propaganda on self efficiency and performance, still sounds like a positive thing. However, humans can't be measured solely by the results we produce... well, that is the very definition of capitalism. Hmm, this is becoming more challenging than I thought to make an argument. Let me share what sprung up this thought and my urge to write.

Been spending time building with Claude Code and it has been genuinely enjoyable.

What began as a small exercise turned into iterating on a recipe manager. Less focused on UI polish and more focused on testing structure, data flow, and technical capabilities. I was really getting into what I wanted this app to be doing.

MVP can be validated in a few hours. (I can imagine even in minutes with experience.) What takes longer is determining how the product functions and what values it is built around.

I’ve been thinking about why using digital products often feels exhausting. Not functionally, but emotionally.

A quiet moment in a K-drama made me realize how rarely design tries to comfort us before it tries to convert us.

So I wrote an essay. Not a framework, not a playbook just a reflection on empathy, trust, and the emotional weight we carry when we interact with products today.

If you’ve ever wondered why “user-centered design” still feels so user-draining, this might resonate.

The new Utah 2034 branding has been controversial; almost too easy to hate.

But instead of repeating the surface-level discourse, I wanted to explore the part that’s actually interesting: the deliberate decision to sacrifice immediate readability in favor of dynamic symbolic legibility.

Artificial Intelligence(AI), Mixed Reality(XR) including Augmented Reality(AR) & Virtual Reality(VR), and blockchain (Crypto) are the top three most talked-about technologies today. We all wonder which of these will continue growing. I was thinking the same thing and wanted to create a guideline to focus on what I wanted to invest in.

I’ve been a designer for the last 15 years, and my background in applying emergent technologies and media design keeps me engaged with the latest technologies and the culture around it.

Here’s my viewpoint:

1. AI — Tool for Summarizing Read & Write
2. XR — Tool for Extending the Experience of Read
3. Blockchain — Tool for Extending the Experience of Write

Let me unpack this…

Decided to create a skybox with ugly drawings on figma. And it was fun, reminded me of my old studies.

First foray into VR was about 12 years ago, but I didn’t know what it was at the time. I was creating equirectangular projection for Quicktime. I photographed an old memorial, Jeoldusan Martyr’s Shrine. The area is known in the past as an execution ground for converted Catholics. Also, next to the shrine is the Yanghwajin Foreign Missionary Cemetery, another burial ground of Christians.

If the previous post and this is about how our brains capture media feed. Curious to know any difference in capturing the outdoors via a computer process technique will evoke a different feel.

We are constantly overloaded with digital media. Our brains can only take a limited amount of data at a time, I feel this (right side) is what we do to our brains when we are doomscrolling.

Chaotic bits of information making no sense and scrambling our brains along with it. We’re constantly changing what we see and understand. We don’t have a clear head on where we’re headed. No wonder we’re filled with despair and hopelessness.

Being a designer for so long, I forget that although the principles are the same, how design is expressed in different industries varies. This week I had the opportunity to delve into gaming motion graphics and rekindled my interest.

5 Things I've learned while I tried to pickup what the designers do in this industry.

The next lesson in threejs implementing GUI controls for debugging objects in the 3D space. Since I had a GLTF object, I was curious to know if the process in adding the GUI would be smooth. But then I got caught in the Old Net with the 90s website and still am.

Loading 3d GLTF models in three.js from blender and giving them materials! Lot of steps and much javascript knowledge needed, but made it! Also, roughness and metal properties inside of THREE.MeshStandardMaterial({roughness: 0.05, metalness: 0.95})

Nostalgic about an era I lived in my childhood is both escapism and yearning of innocence. I spent days reading up on games being made oversea through magazines. Imagining how it would build upon the low quality images and a bunch of words. It was never about guessing the mechanics of the game, but about how the play experience would make me feel. A sense of adventure, thrill, entertainment, responsibility of actions, horror of consequences, or simple joy.

Warming up on Blender. Refreshing my mind on Blender. Remember those toys back in the 90s? There was the Might Max series or the Polly Pocket series, appearing between the commercial breaks with that child narrator and the sing alongs. Always wanted one, never did have one. Saw lot of my friends bring it to school though.

Drafted a visual design, a revamp on the colors and thought Space Grotesk for the typography would make the UI pop more. More importantly I started pondering about the dashboard users would land on upon opening the app.

I want to recap though: to create a rendering of 3d objects in web using three.js we need 4 things: 1. The Scene 2. The Object 3. The Camera 4. The Renderer – Also remember that the material function is THREE.MeshBasicMaterial({color})

I started reworking the application for Economic Events Calendar, which I worked on back in 2016. Back then, we wanted to create a crowd-lead platform for economic forecasts. I was in charge of the UX. Researching about the industry, understanding the lingo, and talking with a few traders.

There’s a mentioning of design in juxtaposition to the economy & technology in Kenya Hara’s Book on Designing Design. Its peculiar statement perfectly describes the sentiment of many business stakeholders about design today. Kenya Hara mentions that – Design hasn’t always been in the role of a servant to the economy & technology sector, which I’d feel is an adequate description of many of us designers.

Following the thoughts of Designer Kenya Hara, my approach is often about looking deeper into things, I consider it design and not just a part of a design process. The notion of looking deeper into things is in itself design.