Commencement speech for UC Berkeley MDes
Graduates, today you stand at the threshold of a world shimmering with possibility. Our world is being redesigned in real time, one choice at a time. This is an era marked by rapid change and creative collisions. You, as designers, carry something rare: the capacity to sculpt clarity from chaos and turn intention into impact.
During your time at Berkeley, you may have discovered that design is a discipline and a disposition. It asks you to be bold enough to imagine, and humble enough to iterate. It asks you to move through the world with eyes open and heart awake, tuned to the feelings your designs evoke.
In this era of AI acceleration, fractured attention, and relentless reinvention, the world needs more than problem solvers and product builders. We need possibility seekers, makers of meaning, and people who ask, “What should we become?”
Because design, at its core, is about what could be, and what will be.
As you step into the next chapter of your lives, remember the calling you carry: to shape futures with intention, to bring clarity to confusion, and to make the invisible visible.
You’ve learned the tools. You’ve honed the craft. But what comes next—your career and your life—won’t be shaped by tools alone. They’ll hopefully be shaped by a handful of principles that I’ve found essential.
Principle 1: Make Vision Tangible
The first principle is the core of our craft: Make Vision Tangible
At the highest levels of product development, the lines between product management and design blur into a shared horizon. Product managers often envision themselves as the “CEO” of the product. Designers are trained to think expansively by revealing unmet needs and conjuring new possibilities. The happiest, healthiest teams understand this simple truth: the designer’s superpower is to make vision tangible.
Make. Vision. Tangible.
Your job is to make the unseen, seen. Your job is to show the future before it exists.
It is easier than ever for anyone to make an idea tangible—to generate a quick image or a simple wireframe. That is merely execution. Design is fundamentally about transformation, about moving energy, and lifting people up. Intention, discernment, and consequence separate the designer from someone just using a generative tool.
In every company, across every industry, you will encounter well-meaning leaders who say, “I’ll know what I want when I see it.” This is not indecision—it is human nature. Our imaginations need scaffolding. Our choices need shape. Our direction needs a first draft.
Making vision tangible isn't just about getting a 'yes' from a stakeholder; it's about forcing a conversation about the kind of future we want to build.
So don’t wait. Draw the possibilities. Prototype the paths. Show the future before it exists. Offer contrasting alternatives so stakeholders can understand the consequences of their decisions before they’re made. As the famous music producer Rick Rubin so beautifully puts it: “Let’s play both and see what happens.”
Principle 2: Find Something to Love In What You Do
But vision isn’t enough if you can’t sustain yourself while bringing it to life. That brings me to the next principle: Find Something to Love in What You Do.
You’ve heard it a thousand times at ceremonies like this: Follow your passion.
This is great advice—if you're a trust fund kid.
For the rest of us, passion can feel like a riddle to someone in their twenties. How do you know what you’ll love if you haven’t lived enough to try?
A more useful truth is this:
Passion often follows commitment. It grows with attention. It emerges from doing, not dreaming.
Work stretches you, surprises you, frustrates you, refines you. It shapes you as much as you shape it. Challenges are portals. They push you to become the next version of yourself.
Instead of searching for the perfect job, look for the intersection between what the world needs and what you can uniquely offer. Cultivate passion the way one cultivates a garden: by taking on difficult tasks like pulling weeds, pruning, and having the patience to see work through the slow seasons.
Don’t obsess over “doing what you love.”
Find something to love in what you do.
Principle 3: Design Your Life as a Hacker, Not as an Architect
Once you find something to love, even if it’s a small piece, you’ll discover something unexpected: the work starts to point you somewhere. It reveals new directions. Following those directions requires a different kind of design discipline… which brings me to the third principle. Design Your Life as a Hacker, Not as an Architect.
I’ve worked with several architects while building three homes over the last 20 years. Architects design iteratively early on, but once construction begins, change can be catastrophic. There is no room for iteration once the walls go up.
Software is born in iterations. Every launch is a prototype. Every version is a learning. Every release is a revision of reality.
Don’t design your life like an architect with a rigid 5-year blueprint. Design it like a hacker: curious, responsive, open, adaptable. Listen deeply to the world. Listen deeply to yourself. Experiment. Adjust. Prototype your path.
When I was growing up, Asian parents told their kids that medicine or law were the only respectable careers. Had I followed that script, I would have missed the entire internet revolution—the risks, the rewards, the ride on the rocket ships.
Instead, I prototyped my life. One experiment led to another.
A growing interest in yoga to save my ossifying hips inspired me to take yoga teacher training. While I initially sought the training simply to become a better student, the experience compelled me to hold space for others. So, I offered free yoga classes at Google. That first experiment quickly grew my skills and landed me a job at a prominent yoga studio, where I taught for ten years.
Similarly, during my last year at Google, I received numerous inquiries from executives, entrepreneurs, and investors who sought my expertise on design for their startups. All those coffee dates revealed an opportunity to design my own role in venture capital. Before diving in and making a long-term commitment, I assumed a 3-month Entrepreneur-in-Residence role at a venture capital firm. The EIR role was my way of prototyping a role I envisioned for myself as a designer in venture capital.
None of these were part of a master plan. They were iterations, tests that taught me who I was and how I wanted to serve.
This is what it means to design your life like a hacker:
Hold your intention. Loosen your assumptions. Build, test, learn. Repeat.
The architect designs for certainty; the hacker designs for discovery. Be a designer of discovery.
You can still plan your path with intention and purpose, but stay willing to walk the one that reveals itself.
Principle 4: Stay curious and interested
To walk the path that reveals itself, you need finely tuned sensors—new inputs, fresh questions, and a commitment to keep learning. And that’s the heart of the fourth principle: Stay curious and interested.
When I was in graduate school studying electrical and computer engineering, I felt increasingly disenchanted with the field. I didn’t share my classmates’ enthusiasm for building technology for its own sake. I craved the human element. Then, one day, I stumbled across a graph in my computer architecture textbook illustrating Fitts’s Law. It lit up something in me. I realized that an entire field existed around how humans interact with technology. Around the same time, I discovered the textbook Engineering Psychology and Human Performance—and learned that the author was a professor at my own university.
One thing led to another, and I began stitching together my own path in human–computer interaction by taking courses in computer science, psychology, and industrial engineering. Back then, you couldn’t major in HCI; I made my own path by following my interests and my curiosity.
To continue prototyping and pushing boundaries, whether in work or in life, you must guard against the gravitational pull of expertise. Doing so requires humility. Because, as you achieve success and gain seniority, it becomes harder to maintain that open, iterative approach. You feel pressure to know instead of wonder, to deliver instead of discover. Failure starts to feel expensive.
So redefine failure.
Toddlers don’t “fail” at walking—they learn by walking. You, too, can reclaim the beginner’s mind. Careers don’t unfold in straight lines.
When I left my executive role at Google to join Udacity, then a 20-person startup, someone said to me, “Why leave a job at Google for a company no one has ever heard of?” They couldn’t see that I wasn’t chasing prestige. I was feeding my interests and curiosity. Reinventing higher education was so much more meaningful to me than dealing with the politics at Google. And that experience at the startup made me far more effective and well-suited for a subsequent role in venture capital.
Life is a constant process of becoming. Once you accept this, you become less attached to outcomes and more devoted to the process.
Principle 5: Be Gracious
The curiosity and devotion to process I've been describing is how you design your professional self. But your success as a designer—your ability to actually launch your work and make an impact—will depend entirely on your ability to work within human systems. Great design is never created in a vacuum; it’s a collective act.
Your ability to collaborate, communicate, and lead with empathy is what turns good ideas into great realities. This brings me to my final and most fundamental principle: Be gracious.
Your hard skills earn you a seat at the table.
Your soft skills determine whether people want you at the table.
Seek mentors. Be the person people are excited to collaborate with. Build relationships not as transactions but as human connections. Be vulnerable enough to let others see you, and generous enough to truly see them.
Be on time. This is my mothering advice, I know. If you’re late, you’re making a product decision. You’re designing an experience where ten people sit in a room staring at a clock. Don't design that experience. Show up. Respecting other people’s time is fundamental to gracious design.
Follow through and follow up. Execute your action items and respond to people promptly. If you are unable to do so, don’t shrink away and ghost people. Send a message to let them know why you can’t follow through; at least they will know they are not forgotten.
People will measure your ability to ship a product by your ability to show up on time and follow through on your commitments. This discipline is the inner architecture of your reliability. It builds your internal muscles for being considerate to others and addressing others’ needs, all qualities that are crucial to being a great designer.
How you do anything is how you do everything.
And always, always, say thank you.
The newer the relationship, the more thoughtful the thank-you should be.
From handwritten notes to heartfelt messages, gratitude is a form of grace.
Ask yourself often:
“How can I be the most gracious person in the room?”
Design is never a solo project. Every product is a reflection of the team that built it. Your soft skills are the APIs of your collaboration. They determine the friction, the efficacy, and the quality of the human system around your work.
When you design with graciousness, something powerful happens: your values begin to radiate outward. That is why being gracious is good design.
Conclusion
The greatest skill you possess is your humanity. If you cannot sit with your own discomfort, how can you truly design away the user’s friction? If you cannot acknowledge your own moments of joy, how can you design for delight? Your fundamental ability is to translate feeling into function. When you practice graciousness, you are practicing the self-awareness and empathy required to feel the human consequences of your craft.
Every design, whether it’s a product, an experience, or a process, is an energy transmission, from you to the world. It carries your feeling. Your values, your intention, and your integrity are all encoded in what you create. People do more than use your product. They feel it. They can feel when something has been designed with care. They can also feel when it hasn’t.
So rise to the occasion.
Make something great.
Make something generous.
Make something that leaves the world lighter than you found it.
Don’t create for fame, or revenue, or promotion.
Create from the purity of purpose and heart.
Believe in yourself. The people who make extraordinary things are no more special than you. They simply kept going. They kept making.
Take action. There are no barriers to entry. If you encounter a challenge, there is always a way. Don’t wait for permission from someone else to take those barriers down.
Yes, AI will reshape our landscape. Maybe it will transform design roles as we know them today. But design itself, as the shaping of systems, experiences, objects, interactions, and meanings, will always be essential. Everything that touches a human life needs design.
Design, at its highest form, is an act of courage, an act of care, and an act of hope.
Go now, graduates. You are the stewards of that future.
Go design it better than we could have ever imagined.
(This speech was delivered on December 14, 2025 at the UC Berkeley Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation for the MDes graduating class.)