Origin

I became an engineer because I wanted to know how things worked. Not in the way you’re supposed to say that in an interview — I mean I genuinely could not leave things alone. As a kid I took apart a radio to find the voices inside it and never quite managed to put it back together. The voices, it turned out, were not in there. That was my first real lesson: the thing you can see is almost never where the answer lives.

Electrical engineering felt like the honest choice. It was rigorous. It was provable. A circuit either worked or it didn’t, and when it didn’t, there was a reason, and the reason was findable if you were patient and humble enough to trace it. I loved that the world had rules underneath it, and that if you learned the rules you could read situations other people experienced only as noise.

What I didn’t expect was what engineering would do to the way I see everything.

You spend enough years thinking in circuits and feedback loops and you stop seeing objects. You start seeing systems. A light switch is no longer a switch — it’s the visible end of something with current and resistance and intention running behind it. You learn that the behaviour at the surface is produced by relationships you can’t see. You learn that you cannot fix the surface by touching the surface. You have to understand the structure.

I didn’t know it then, but that was the most important thing I would ever learn, and it had almost nothing to do with electricity.

Because here is the quiet problem I kept running into: the systems that interested me most weren’t the electrical ones. They were the human ones. Why did people use a thing one way and not the way it was built for? Why did a perfectly logical solution get ignored, while a worse, warmer one got adopted? Engineering had trained me to look for the structure beneath behaviour, and the behaviour I kept being drawn to was human behaviour.

For a while I didn’t have a word for that pull. I thought it was a distraction from real work. I’d be debugging something technical and find myself more curious about the person who would eventually use it — what they’d assume, what they’d fear, where they’d give up. That felt like a flaw.

I want to be honest about how I found design, because the truth is less heroic than the story I could tell. I did not have a moment of clarity. I drifted toward it, almost embarrassed, the way you move toward something you suspect you’re not allowed to want. I started paying attention to how things were made to be understood — interfaces, signs, instructions, the small decisions that determined whether a person felt capable or stupid. I realised someone had designed all of it, and most of them had designed it badly — not for lack of skill, but because they’d never asked the question that obsessed me: what is actually happening inside the person using this?

That was the door. When I walked through it, I expected design to be the opposite of engineering — intuition instead of logic, feeling instead of structure. I was wrong, and being wrong was the best thing that happened to me. Design wasn’t the opposite of engineering at all. It was the same instinct pointed at a different system.

People sometimes hear “electrical engineer who became a designer” and treat it as a detour, a wrong turn corrected. I’ve stopped explaining it that way. Engineering taught me the one belief that still organises everything I do: you do not design the thing you can see. You design the system that produces it. A screen is just the radio’s casing. The voices — the perception, the trust, the confusion, the delight — are somewhere behind it, in the structure, in the human being I have not met yet but am responsible for.

I didn’t find design. I think design was the name for what I had always been doing, and engineering was just the long, patient way I learned how to do it well. The curiosity came first. Engineering gave it a method. Design gave it a purpose. And the purpose, it turned out, was never the machine.

It was always the person on the other side of it.

The voices were never inside the thing. They were in the people all along.

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