About Me
Hi again, happy you're here!
I'm Kimmy Shen, a self-taught product designer studying cognitive science (psychology concentration) @ Rice University.
When I stumbled across product design a year ago, everything finally clicked into place. With my love of the arts (more on this below) and passion for understanding people, product design felt like my true calling.
It's quite hard to encapsulate who a person is in a single page, but here's my best attempt:
I ♥︎ creating art.
Would I call myself a dancer? Before coming to college, not really. I certainly danced, but the years of traditional Chinese dance and ballet lessons weren't engaging enough for me to develop an affinity for it.
Meeting the Rice dance community completely changed that. It has been such a joy to create, learn, practice, and perform dances with so many wonderful people. With the sheer amount of positivity and support I've received over the years, it's no wonder that many of my dearest friends have come from the community.
It's truly special that something I used to not care about at all is now one of my greatest passions. Through dance, I've gained leadership skills through director roles, an eye for movement flow, and a loving community I can call my second family :)
Side note: The more experience I gain in both dance and design, the more I realize how strikingly similar they are in principle.
More of my dance documentation:
I ♥︎ creating art.
My identity with visual art is a little more complicated.
My whole life, I've been labeled as the "art kid". Every single birthday card I've ever gifted is hand-drawn. The walls of both my childhood home and apartment are covered in my paintings. I even sold watercolor bookmarks in middle school and made profits in the double digits. Visual art has always brought me comfort while providing enough challenge and possibility so that I don't get bored.
However, as a kid swamped in rigorous STEM academics, it felt like there was no room for creativity anymore.
This dilemma is why discovering product design felt so miraculous. Sitting at the very intersection of art and STEM I had been seeking my whole life, I only wished I knew about it sooner.
My background in visual art now shapes the way I approach design, particularly in color, composition/layout, and typography. What once felt like a hobby I had to leave behind has become the very foundation of the work I do today.
Side note: I wrote my college essay on this very issue; the theme was forks.
More of my art documentation: