Tabitha Yong
UX Designer on a sabbatical
Welcome to the fifteenth edition of Async Chats! This letter is all about candid conversations with people like yourself. If you’d like some more context see this letter. Otherwise, let’s get into this.
Tabitha is a UX designer on a creative sabbatical to explore documentary filmmaking. She lives in Los Angeles, but is currently traveling and searching for stories. Next stop is Southeast Asia.
Are you a hybrid, in-person, or remote worker? Why?
Right now I'm remote, but it depends on the types of projects I'm taking! A filmmaking project typically requires being in-person for shooting, but I can usually do post-production type of work remotely. I've also been experimenting with interactive documentaries, so the interaction design part is pretty similar to a typical UX process, which I can do remotely as well.
What are your interests outside of work?
Lately, I'm enjoying scuba diving, snorkeling, painting, reading nonfiction, yoga, playing piano (when I have access to one), and cooking! Two topics of interest I find myself returning to are non-Western cultures' relationships to technology and the planet, and political conflicts rooted in ideological differences.
What are some of your favorite digital or physical tools?
I'm interested in tools that enable more possibilities for creativity and collaboration. A few digital tools I've enjoyed lately have been Procreate, DALL-E, Sprout, and Ozone.
Do you prefer to work/ communicate asynchronously or synchronously? Why?
It depends. To get into my flow state for design or pre/post-production work, I need many hours of uninterrupted focus time, so I prefer to do that asynchronously. But when getting feedback, I find that endlessly pinging comments is less fun than just getting on a call in-person and swapping ideas, so I prefer synchronous time for that!
Questions of the week:
How long have you been a UX designer? How did you get into it?
I've been a UX designer for around 8 years now! My formal background is in graphic design, which I studied at RISD. I do love graphic design — its ability to provoke emotion, clarify information, or bring personality to whatever it's applied to. But I've also always been curious about disciplines outside of graphic design; in school, I also explored subjects like philosophy, anthropology, and computer science. When I learned that UX design existed as a job, I got excited, because it was the closest job I found at the time that included aspects of all of my interests. I cared deeply about the kinds of problems I was working on, and I loved making experiences useful for people and being more embedded in their lives in order to create them.
My first formal UX design experience was at Apple, which is a great place to kick off a career in design. I decided that UX design was what I wanted to do full-time, but I wanted to apply that craft to social problems that were meaningful and important to me, so that's what led me to places like Amnesty International and Khan Academy. After diving deep in the education space for a few years, I wanted to explore other topics and leave the traditional product design space, so I ended up in Google Research (Google's R&D division). I got to explore far-ranging topics from quantum computing to bio-interfaces to AI's intersections with topics like creative tooling and racial equity. By the end of my time there, I was leading UX on a portfolio of emerging climate tech projects.
Why take a sabbatical from your current role and why pursue filmmaking?
Not long after I graduated from art school, I learned about Stefan Sagmeister's practice of taking a yearlong sabbatical once every seven years. I remember thinking, This makes sense! Why wait until the end of your life to explore the world? I will save up to do this for myself too. It seemed essential as a creative person to get out of the rut of routine work to gather more inspiration from what else is out there. At the time, I didn't yet know what my sabbatical would entail; I only knew that I wanted to travel. I kept this as a backburner dream for years.
Incidentally, every seven years is also around the time that mid-career professionals start wondering what's next anyway — all of my designer peers were contemplating or transitioning into management, or switching companies, or going to grad school, or leaving their cushy tech jobs to co-found companies or become angel investors. I enjoyed my job at Google, but I did wonder what was next.
I did a Designing Your Life exercise called the Odyssey Plan. In it, you design 3 different versions of your next five years.
Your first option is your standard next five years if you were to continue on your current trajectory: in my case, it was continuing in tech. If I stuck with it, I thought perhaps my next step would be becoming a founding member of a startup, since I loved early-stage spaces and I missed wearing a lot of different hats besides design.
The second option is your next five years if your industry didn't exist anymore. I thought, if I wasn't in tech, what would I be? My answer has always been a documentary filmmaker or journalist. I wanted to be out in the field, embedded with the communities I was creating things for. One of my favorite things to do was dive into ambiguous, unknown, complex spaces and pull out a story or ways to make that information more accessible and compelling to wider audiences. I did some version of this in all of my jobs.
Once I clarified to myself that this was a field I wanted to explore, the way I decided to approach my sabbatical was similar to how I'd approach any ambiguous problem: with a series of prototypes. I loved the idea of living multiple lives in one lifetime. So I decided to prototype a life where I was in documentary filmmaking and traveling. The first few months of my sabbatical have been about figuring out if I really do like filmmaking and learning about the industry and how I'd want to move within it.
Do you have any traditional filmmaking education – film school, etc?
I do not! My path in filmmaking has been fairly non-traditional. I'm still making it up as I go.
Prior to my sabbatical, I had made short films for fun on my personal time — videos of places I traveled to, or memories I wanted to capture. I also made short films on occasion at work, of user research trips or to illustrate potential futures. In R&D especially, we had a practice called speculative design fiction, where designers would create narrative videos telling the story of a potential future to help audiences imagine what it would be like if a particular future technology were already here. In UX, narrative storytelling is arguably one of the most powerful parts of our toolkit, so I leveraged making short films for my job when I could.
However, once my sabbatical started, I explored a few options for more formal filmmaker training. I signed up for a few introductory filmmaking and documentary filmmaking courses where I got to research, direct, write, and produce my own short films — and I definitely learned a lot by making them and getting crits from peers and audiences. However, I learned that a large number of people I spoke to in the film industry have actually never done traditional film school; their belief is that the best way to learn is on the job. Half the people I spoke to broke into the industry by making connections and jumping in on a real set or starting in commercial filmmaking or photography before transitioning over to documentary. The other half of the people I talked to pursued grad school in journalism or adjacent subjects, or MFAs in documentary filmmaking.
I'm still exploring what path could make the most sense for me. Everyone I talked to in film got excited about my experience in design and tech. There are conversations in the doc film world about ways to push the medium itself for storytelling. I've been experimenting with collaborating on interactive documentaries, similar to what's showcased in MIT's Open Documentary Labs. I've also been asked to collaborate on many projects where a documentary film might have a product to accompany it, and drive action following the documentary (for example, co-creating films about climate change, and creating some kind of product or platform to drive audience action). The doc film industry and tech industry don't often overlap, but it's pretty cool to see where there's potential symbiosis.
You mentioned climate change a few times – what has drawn you to climate change and how do you hope to impact it?
For me, the initial draw to doing work in climate change was emotionally registering its urgency— I'm sure I don't need to reiterate how climate change is already here, and that its effects exacerbate inequitable social conditions.
What initially made me hopeful was recognizing that unlike with most social problems, where technology harms more than helps — with climate change, technology actually can play a key part in addressing the issue. Aside from alternative energy, examples of tech's potential solutions include creating tools that make it easier to reduce or limit emissions ("mitigation"), and aggregating data in a way that helps communities / industries predict, understand, and respond to climate change's effects ("adaptation"). It excited me to see parts of the tech industry mobilizing to leverage tech to help with this massive existential problem from multiple angles. Especially at Google, I thought tech seemed well-positioned to make an impact by connecting these technological solutions to intended audiences, and designing ways to make adopting those climate-friendly solutions easier.
However, while there's certainly a benefit to leveraging tech to address climate change, I think there's also danger in making tech the only lens through which we see the problem. The more I dove into research about climate solutions, the more I learned about how a lot of the problem has to do with cultural values; much of human-caused global warming has been due to the Global North's long history of colonialism and extraction. The more I read about indigenous philosophy and their leadership in living harmoniously with the earth, and political proposals for environmental policy that counter capitalism's default logic of growth at all costs, the more I wondered about whether there's more merit to how other cultures and communities perceive and address climate change. What would a future look like with those alternative values in place? How different would we be if we considered the planet just as divine and worthy of respect as people? If we prioritized care over profit?
So now, with my sabbatical, I've shifted my view of how I might impact climate change by exploring these questions. I don't know yet how it'll manifest — maybe it'll be in trying to elevate stories about non-Western approaches to climate change through film. Maybe it'll be bringing more of what I'm learning back into tech, should I decide to return to UX design after my sabbatical. We'll see!
I really love what you said:
How different would we be if we considered the planet just as divine and worthy of respect as people?
This seems like such a simple and obvious consideration, but in a world of flagrant social injustice, how can we expect people to respect our planet when we cannot respect our fellow person?
I definitely empathize with the lamentation in this question — how can we expect people to change? The way the world is right now can feel overwhelming and immutable.
On days when I'm hopeful, I think: history shows that societies and people's cultural attitudes are always changing; what we take for granted as normal today, can shift. Just a century ago, things like women’s suffrage and gay rights, and desegregation were unimaginable in the U.S. Of course there's still a long way to go for many historically marginalized groups, and progress isn't linear — but it helps to remember that fundamentally, the societies we live in are made up by people, and can be changed by people. The modern world order we're living in is still so young compared to the many preceding millennia of human civilization, which constituted far more bloodshed.
I've experienced or read about moments in other cultures, particularly Global South cultures, that made me hopeful enough to imagine that a different world is possible. Those moments gave me glimpses of what a world can look like when we don't assume our culture's values are the default. A society that's founded on competition, individual achievement, exploitation, growth, and profit at all costs will produce very different incentives and results than a society that prioritizes cooperation, community care, regeneration, and ecological wellbeing.
A few years ago, Pinterest cofounder Evan Sharp implored a room full of Silicon Valley design leaders to think about the moral vision of their work. He brought up a tidbit on American history that I never forgot (I'm paraphrasing my notes because the talk wasn’t officially recorded or publicized):
“In 1542, when European settlers arrived in California, they portrayed it as a continent's worth of virgin wilderness tamed and made civilized. They originally described California as a sort of wild Eden, filled with teeming biodiversity, massive diverse flower gardens for hundreds of miles, and trees older than all of Western civilization. Now remember, the European settlers had never seen anything like this. Europe's natural resources were already comparatively desecrated by this point. To these settlers, California was untouched. Pristine. A natural paradise.
But here's the thing that blew my mind: it WASN'T untouched wilderness. What the settlers saw was actually the result of WORK from the native people. There was not a square mile that hadn't been hand-tended for over a millennia by the native tribes. Every square mile was hand-harvested, tilled, and burned in a way that yielded enough biological wealth to sustain the densest nations on the continent. And not to mention, sustained the European settlers, ranchers, and farmers who came after.
Reading 'Tending the Wild' haunted me; it raised the real and likely possibility that our current culture is built on a fundamental error. Maybe we got it wrong about what makes people happy and fulfilled. Maybe we got it wrong about how we measure success. Maybe we should rethink the GOAL of all of this."
Western notions of conservation and environmentalism treat nature like a separate, ambient, non-sentient entity that humans steward at best, and exploit at worst.
In contrast, indigenous peoples view both themselves and nature as part of an extended ecological family, viable only when humans view the life surrounding them as kin. The interactions that result from "kincentric ecology" enhance and preserve the ecosystem.
To me, it's possible to imagine that the world could be different... because it is different in other societies. Bhutan is carbon negative and ranks highest in the world on happiness. And even though indigenous people currently comprise less than 5% of the world population, they protect 80% of the Earth's biodiversity in forests, deserts, grasslands, and marine environments. When you step out of narratives privileging the current Western world order, you realize there are so many possible other ways to live and interact with the world and with each other that are absolutely viable.
During your research and exploration – have you found any solutions or stories that call out to you, that you hope to explore further?
Still researching and exploring!
How can the readers of this letter help you, if help is indeed needed?
I’m always happy to meet interlocutors interested in exploring similar topics around climate, culture, communities, and ideological conflict.
I’m also looking for collaborators and interesting projects in film. If anyone already works in documentary filmmaking or knows someone who does, I would love to connect!
What is something few people know about you?
I love a good-faith, informative debate! I'm not afraid of confrontation if I believe in what I'm standing up for, and I generally love to have my ideas challenged in order to learn about my blind spots. Whenever a sensitive or controversial subject comes up in conversation, I typically don't hesitate to engage and seek to learn more.
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