My outtie name is Emily Liu.

My innie name is Xiaofei 笑飞, the name I was given.

笑飞 could mean LMAO in Chinese slang.

I read it as 笑傲江湖 肆意纷飞:

to proudly roam the world unfettered with a smile, flying wild, wherever the wind takes me.

A Chinese soul living in Toronto.

A Human-native designer in an AI-native world.

Everyone is a designer.

All of us are designing — designing a day, a space, a conversation, a Christmas tree, cities, highways, designing the path a life will take. We also shape the things that exist only because we collectively agree they do: laws, money, languages, social orders. As Sapiens puts it, these are imagined realities — fictions that hold real power the moment enough people believe in them. Almost everything around us, physical or not, was first imagined, then made real.

So what is design, really?

The opposite of design is not “ugly.” It is “whatever,” “by chance,” “left to happen on its own” — the wild growth of nature, 野蛮生长、各凭本事、物竞天择: where each thing fends for itself and only the fittest remain. A tree that grows on its own is not design. A tree planted to grow that way — that is design.

To imagine, in your mind, something that does not yet exist and then bring it into being. This is what I am choosing to do.