How do you become your own person?
I studied many things, through school, experience, and advice I received growing up. But I still wondered when I would “become.”
In a world as unpredictable as shifting sand dunes, how do you plant a marker, not in the sand, but in the sky above it – to move alongside the wind?
Thoughts from a younger me
In my final year of high school, I started to notice that the paths laid out for us didn’t feel as steady as they once did. The solutions that worked for our parents didn’t seem to fit our reality anymore. While the world around me felt uncertain, my own life was just beginning to take shape. I became more aware of what was happening around me, even though I still didn’t know what I wanted.
When making was how I understood the world
I grew up in a family that valued both creativity and logic. To escape long, intense summers, I became a homebody and spent my time making things: things I loved, things shaped by feeling, things meant to be shared with my parents and the people closest to me.
Birthday cards, paper boats and airplanes, paintings, embroidery, stickers, and more.
Like many artists, I grew up believing that art should serve a purpose; that it should be useful or helpful, even if that meant eventually turning my creativity into something more sustainable.
Design is the space you define
In university, I studied, absorbed, and collected ideas, but it took time for them to truly settle. Understanding wasn’t something I could rush – it arrived when it was ready.
Now, everything feels like design.
Whether we design deliberately or let things unfold, everything eventually finds its place. Once I captured the essence of that, it was easier to “become”.
“To trust the unfolding of life” – Peter Gould, The Heart of Design
Kaleido is a lens into my world.
Kaleido comes from kaleidoscope, rooted in the Greek words kalos (beautiful) and eidos (form), reflecting the idea of seeing beauty through ever-changing perspectives.
For a long time, I kept the meaning I found through making close, almost hidden. Very few people knew what I was making, reading, or thinking. Now, it feels like the right moment to open that space and begin sharing what I’ve learned through creating.
In a field as fluid as design, I’m still learning how to describe what I want to build and who I want to become through it. Change is inevitable, and if it truly is the only constant, then learning becomes something we carry for life.
Through my monthly Lens, here’s a glimpse of what I’ll be exploring and sharing:
- Kaleido as a Living Project: Treating a blog as a practice, not a product
- Making, Meaning & Process: What making teaches me that school never did
- Design, Systems & Reality: What does it mean to be a designer in this era
- Learning, Unlearning, Becoming: Getting comfortable with ambiguity
- Slow Internet & Thoughtful Creation: Space cannot be defined without Time
- Art & Education: How art and education are more intertwined than you might think
- Finding Community: You never walk alone
Over time, both my interests and the conversations I hold will continue to shift.
For now, this is my Kaleido: a small collection of beautiful forms as I see them today.
I’d love to know what yours looks like.
– Ariba