Introduction

When I sat down to write this introductory blog post, I couldn’t decide what to write about. Should I outline the last ten years of my life, and the roundabout way I left and then came back to design? Should I do a Buzzfeed-style list of things readers should know about me? Or should I just jump into it - start writing about all of the things I care deeply about, and not worry about onboarding or holding the hands of my dear readers?

Dear reader, I decided to do a little of all three. Have your cake and eat it too, if you will.

My name is Samantha, (that much I assume you’ve already parsed) and I was born in the rust belt city of Cleveland, Ohio. I’m the eldest of three daughters, which tells you almost everything you need to know about me, and my family is Catholic, which tells you the rest. In 2013, I graduated from the University of Cincinnati’s School of DAAP (design, art, architecture, and planning, although I hear the acronym is a bit different nowadays) with a bachelor’s degree in Industrial Design. Instead of pursuing a design degree, however, I went into coffee. For the last 7 years, I’ve been a barista - first at Phoenix Coffee, in Cleveland, OH, and at several other shops since then.

Why a barista? When I was burnt out and exhausted from 5 years of intensive design study, I decided to take a “break” (more on that later) to do something else, where I could get my hands a little dirty and connect with my community. Working in a coffee shop, you assume a lot of roles. A barista brews coffee and steams milk, but she also chats with locals about their day, listens to her coworkers rant about their ex-boyfriends, and participates in community events like farmer’s markets and outreach programs. I like to tell people that as a barista, I’m usually the first person people see on their morning commute, and I take the responsibility of setting the tone for their day very seriously. On busy days, with lines out the door, baristas are tasked with getting every drink perfect, every time. On slow days, we get to connect with the customers who come in on a deeper level, and I still talk to several “regulars” even years later.

However, with the rise of covid-19 in the spring of 2020, I found that being a barista became exponentially more difficult. Behind a mask, it’s a lot more difficult to have meaningful conversations with people, and who wants to take the risk of chatting with their favorite regulars when they could be contagious? It was a really difficult time to work in the service industry, but in some ways I’m very grateful for it. Not only did I learn how to do my job in a different way, but the struggle of the last few years gave me a lot of time to think about my old design degree, why I had gone into the design field in the first place, and if there was a future for me outside of coffee, after all.

Design and the service industry have quite a lot in common, actually. We ask questions, we give suggestions, we listen. We take feedback that we’re given and create experiences for customers and users that help them get from point A to point B (or from un-caffeinated to caffeinated!) I realized that what I love about the coffee industry and what I love about the design industry is actually the same thing: people. I love people. I love the way humans interact with their surroundings, and the ways in which we learn from our mistakes and from each other. I love communicating, and how different words affect the ways we perceive each other and the world around us. Turns out, I really love design. Once I realized that, I did a ton of research and landed on General Assembly’s User Experience program, which I’m currently enrolled in (halfway done!)

So, that’s my backstory. Here’s what you’re not going to see on this blog: rehashes of my case studies, the 15th thinkpiece on virtual reality as it relates to UX that you’ve stumbled on this month, or interviews with other designers. I’m not saying any of those things are bad, I’ve read several variations on all of those articles just in the last week. But that’s also why I won’t be adding to the myriad. I’m not an expert designer (yet) and I’m still working out what my opinions and thoughts on design really are, and I expect them to change quite a lot as I move from student to professional designer. Also, if you want to hear about my design process, you’re literally sitting inside of my portfolio, and if I haven’t done a good enough job explaining them here, another Medium article about them isn’t going to help.

Instead, I’m going to get weird. There are a lot of design-adjacent topics that I’m passionate about, and that’s what I’m going to write about here. There will be literary analysis. There will be pop culture references. There will be politics. The first time I was in design school, I thought I had to just be a designer, that no one would want to hear anything I had to say about anything else. And who wants to hear what a barista has to say, right? That’s always been my thinking. But throughout my time at General Assembly, I’m finding how much I love to write, especially about topics other than design. Call it an outlet, or a passion project, or just me practicing being coherent on the internet.

Welcome, and feel free to poke around! I’ll start the coffee maker.