Designing (Cooking) From the Inside Out
Estimated Reading Time: 4-6 minutes
It’s spring of 2016, as I am standing over a stove with my roommates spread out around our townhouse in the south-side slopes of Pittsburgh. The burner is too hot, and I've added too much curry powder, and now the kitchen smells burnt and the curry is bitter. This was my first time trying to recreate my mother's stew chicken from memory alone. My family does not have recipes and would be appalled if you asked them to write it down. I pivot. I reach for brown sugar to cut the heat, then honey for depth. A squeeze of lime I didn't plan for and some butter that may or may not help. I'm tasting, adjusting, trusting something I can't name. And suddenly I realize: I'm designing. I'm experimenting, sensing, adjusting, layering intention and surprise. I'm finding a rhythm in the unknown.
This is where the real work lives, not in the phases and frameworks we use to organize our thinking, but in the exact moment of attention. When your hand hovers over the spice rack. When you're sensing what's missing before you can articulate it. When you're cooking (designing) from the inside out.
Design Begins With You
Design doesn't start with empathy interviews or surveys. It starts with a point of view. A truth claim that is imaginative, boundless, and distinctly unique. Design also starts with first impressions and first encounters. For me, it started with my mother "cookin' down" her famous stew chicken, the aroma of her biases and assumptions about what she thought I needed filling our kitchen with a spicy umami scent. Her food carried stories of Trinidadian culture, of our heritage, of vulnerability and truth. She wasn't designing for me. She was designing from herself, and in doing so, she gave me something I could taste, remember, and eventually make my own.
What's your equivalent? What memory or truth shapes what you make or the work you attend to?
If you're a teacher, maybe it's the moment a student finally understood something because you explained it the way your favorite teacher once explained it to you. If you're an administrator, maybe it's the leadership style you swore you'd never replicate and the divergent approach you've been refining ever since. That's your starting material. Your essence is the solution itself, or at least a solution to the challenges in front of you.
When you tell the truth of your own experience, you open the door for others to find themselves in your design.
Feeling Over Thinking
In his book Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson writes that we must get proximate to understand and heal what's broken. The same is true in design and in cooking. You have to be near the source: near the people, near the ingredients, near the emotions that shape the work you are engaging with.
I learned this by collecting flavors and memories of my grandmother's kitchen when I came home from school, the smell of my mom's saltfish and fry bake on Sunday mornings. To truly hear these stories, I had to be present. Not listening to reply, but listening to feel. Not observing from a distance, but standing near the stove, helping my mother knead the dough into fry bake. My mom was designing and invited me into her world and into her process. What I learned in those moments, with my mother, is that the power of design is in its authenticity. My mom never asked me to perform cooking or perform being a “helpful son” in the kitchen. It was about being proximate to each other, to the food we were cooking, and to our heritage. "Cooking with love" isn't a cliché. It's about reverence. Being in constant awe of what is unfolding in front you. Whether it’s a meal that brings you joy or a conversation with a student that surprises you. Be in awe of it all. Design is not an abstract exercise of pure ideas; it's embodied, grounded in our schools, our classrooms, and the lived experiences that make us who we are.
All the language and jargon associated with design, the phases, the empathy research, the ideation, the testing are either behind you or ahead of you. They're useful for organizing our work and talking to others about what we do, but they are not where the actual work lives. The work lives here, in this moment, where you are actually making something, sharing a conversation, thinking through a problem, or cooking your favorite meal for family and friends.
Design begins with where you are in the present moment. There is only one step in the design process that matters most. It is to stay present. Being present is simple yet extraordinarily difficult. To quote George Sand, “Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.” Move your body to where the work is happening and where the flavors are leading you. If you're an administrator, maybe you spend 30 minutes a day in classrooms when you do not have to be there. Not evaluating, just being present. If you're a teacher, maybe it's eating lunch with students once a week.
Proximity isn't complicated. It's physical. It's relational. It's simple. It's about feeling over thinking.
What I Keep Coming Back To
If you got this far and like practicality here are couple ideas on how to get proximate:
Slow down. What’s the rush really? Good food and good design takes time.
Don’t assume you know. Ask. The most enjoyable meals are when you know what people like.
Make the implicit, explicit in your conversations, interviews, and focus groups. Typically people want to know what they are eating before they eat it.
Lean into resistance when prototyping and testing. It’s usually good information. When you burn the food, adjust, be creative, and accept what is even if it means starting from scratch.
Design with love.
