I’m beginning a series of posts called One Hour a Day of Design Engineering in which I document my process and progress of learning design engineering. The purpose of the series is to hold myself accountable and to document my practice. Maybe some days I’ll only have time for less than an hour of my practice, or I will do more than an hour, but either way I will practice once a day. For context, I am 21 and a senior in college graduating in ~eight months. I hold no internships and no “expertise” in a domain, but I have done some projects. Granted, I am skilled in design and have been learning for the past ~six months (Figma, UI/UX principles, design systems, etc), but I want to level up my game with engineering and going deeper. It’s kind of ironic considering I am a computer science major first and foremost so you would think the engineering part would come first, but that’s not how I am.

I have deeply cared about aesthetics since I was young (~11-12 years old) and it’s something that motivates me everyday. Everything I do is enshrined in aesthetics, even if the influence of it has little to do with the thing. The clothes I wear, the music I listen to, the products I buy, my room, and so much more is intertwined with my preference and care of aesthetics in one way or another. Some domains are more deeply cared about than others, like fashion vs the toothbrush I might buy, but at some level, the care is still there (this was a bad example, I still care about the aesthetics of my toothbrush).

I want to extend this to engineering. I know that if my work does not focus on aesthetics in one way or another, I will not have a deep care or passion for it, which is why design engineering feels very natural. It is a blend of a more curious and technically challenging domain (engineering, programming) with a more awe inspiring, beautiful domain (design, aesthetics).

Something I’ve always noticed in my time spent with computer science is that typical CS nerds don’t have good taste in aesthetics. This is fine, but if they are going to be engineering products and things people use everyday, I want those things to be beautiful. I want people to love those things because of its cool design, or interesting UX, etc. I want to build beautiful websites and components that people deeply enjoy using. This can’t be done without a skillful and needed blend of advanced engineering skill and advanced design skill. A combination of both of these is what will bring out the best humans have to offer in this domain. They work together seamlessly if done right.

My current knowledge stands to help me out a good bit considering I have learnt many many things already relevant to design engineering such as html, css, JavaScript, React, and some other tools; my university classes don’t hurt either. However, I have not mastered any of these (except for html), but that is my plan. Additionally, I have not used some skills in a while such as React, so I will need to do some re-learning. My immediate steps are to fully learn and master CSS, JavaScript, and React. This ensures a good baseline of fundamentals and will allow me to pivot easily to what I want to do next. After these 3 skills, I am not too sure of what to do, but I have some ideas. I am currently brainstorming using Deep Research and the Math Academy framework to really understand my workflow and the future of my learning process.

I’m not sure what my end goal of this series is, maybe it’s to signal to a future employer that I know what good pedagogy is and I know how to learn anything (and fast), or maybe it’s just to make my ego feel good, I don’t know. But, I do know that design engineering is what I am going to be focused on, and learning the skills that come with that can only bring me to better heights and deeper levels of domain expertise.

The pedagogy and habit principles I will be using throughout my journey are based on Advice On Upskilling and The Math Academy Way. I beg anyone who wants to learn more, do more, and be more efficient in their pedagogy to read these texts and deeply internalize them. The path of design engineering I have chosen has been greatly inspired by people like Rauno and Ridd, as well as the teams at Vercel and Paper.