During my involvement with the Discipleship Project, I had the privilege of serving as a web designer. Collaborating closely with project managers, engineers, and visual graphic designers, we collectively developed a purpose-driven website. This platform was dedicated to consolidating essential resources for new believers, facilitating their spiritual journey. It was a rewarding experience contributing to a project that empowers others in their faith.

Hillsong London

We have been viewing the world incorrectly for 500 years.

The traditional world map, designed by Gerardus Mercator in 1569, has long been criticised for its severe distortions. It exaggerates the size of regions in the northern hemisphere, such as Europe and North America, while diminishing areas near the equator. For example, on many maps, Greenland appears as large as Africa, despite being 14 times smaller in reality.

In the 1970s, German journalist Arno Peters publicly denounced the Mercator projection, arguing that it perpetuated a Eurocentric worldview. Even modern alternative maps often fail to accurately depict landforms like Antarctica.

Today, Tokyo-based architect and artist **Hajime Narukawa** has received Japan’s prestigious Good Design Award for his "AuthaGraph World Map," a groundbreaking projection that preserves the true proportions of continents and oceans. Narukawa achieved this by dividing the globe into 96 triangles, transforming it into a tetrahedron, and then unfolding it into a rectangle. This method eliminates the distortions found in Mercator and Dymaxion projections.\
\
<https://narukawa-lab.jp/archives/authagraph-map/>

Remarkably, the map can be seamlessly pieced together, allowing users to reposition any region to the centre while maintaining accurate geographical relationships.

The creator of the AuthaGraph map points out that traditional maps prioritise land masses, whereas today’s global challenges demand greater attention to oceans and polar regions. Issues such as melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and territorial claims over marine resources call for maps that depict the Earth’s surface accurately and impartially.

The AuthaGraph map offers a new perspective, helping people better understand the interconnectedness of the Earth’s land and water systems. Additionally, this innovative map reshapes how we perceive 600 million years of continental drift.\
\
[Wikipedia for AuthaGraph Projection:\
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AuthaGraph\_projection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AuthaGraph_projection)

AuthaGraph

\*Moxa\
<https://moxa.com>\
\
\*TSRC\
<https://www.tsrc.com.tw/>\
\
\*Greenvines\
<https://greenvines.com.tw>\
\
\*Mayrin Group Australia\
<https://mayringroup.com.au/>

\*Taiwan Synthetic Rubber Corp\
<https://www.tsrc.com.tw/>

Tenten

\*Fisheries Agency, the Council of Agriculture, Executive Yuan EC website\
\
\*Original Living Art Festival 2021 (Taitung, Taiwan)\
\
\*Taiwan Pop-in Avignon 2021 (Taipei, Taiwan)\
\
\*Taiwan Avignon off (Avignon, France)\
\
\*Taishin Art awards 18th-20th 2019-2022 (Taipei, Taiwan)\
\
\*Supercare baby formula branding site\
\
\*”Forward” Funding Project Campaign (Taipei, Taiwan)\
\
\*Nuit Blanche Taipei 2019 Website Design (Taipei, Taiwan)\
\
\*Rapidz Website Design (Taipei, Taiwan)\
\
\*Mayrin Group Australia(Taipei, Taiwan)\
\
\*Taiwan Rail ticket stories (Taipei, Taiwan)\
Publication, ISBN 9789864611423\
\
\*Visual identity design (Taipei, Taiwan)\
Taiwan Public Welfare League\
\
\*New Taipei City Government (Taipei, Taiwan)\
Bridges Decoration of light Project

Self Employed

Web3 clients\
\*Orsus\
<https://orsus.netlify.com/>\
\
\*Cartesi\
<https://shorturl.at/ckW57>\
\
\*Kronos\
<https://www.kronostoken.com/>

It’s important to have a network for career development, especially as a self-employed or freelance designer. However, over the past few years, I have had difficulty concentrating on work—not entirely due to the tempting calls from social media platforms, but also because of the endless back-and-forth messages. It is easier said than done to stay within a time limit for message responses; however, with full remote working settings, it is sometimes necessary to prioritise urgent or emergent tasks. I found myself spending loads of attention and fragmented time distinguishing the type of message it falls under.

In my experience as a designer, I've found that ordinary experiences are rich sources of ideas. Communication is the root of most fruitful collaborations, in my opinion as a contributor. Yet, I might be inhibited and eroded by my own beliefs, sacrificing my inner peace and mental condition to respond to others. This leads to putting extra effort into my personal time to restore and recharge, convoluted with the difficulties of separating private mode from work mode.

After listening to the podcast, I realised I haven't been working smart enough to learn how to protect my time and boundaries, both at work and in life. The ideology of making a highlight of your day and prioritising what delights is truly a fruitful thought. Another takeaway is how to communicate your responsive frequency to set up expectations intentionally.

My character is often described as "easy-going," tending to avoid having a firm or strong attitude regarding communication style, which is getting more challenging as I grow older. Seeking more joy than satisfaction, learning how to guard my heart by saying no in a soft tone is a new learning chapter and a belated 2024 goal.

[Lenny’s podcast about make time on substack](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/making-time-for-what-matters-jake)

Protect your mind

```cv
gallery
{"layout":"hscroll","images":[{"src":"https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/maitake-project.appspot.com/o/pages%2Fpl3D0fbvxDXvBwZeQ2ThO4G1igh2%2Ffruit-for-thought%2Fcb5f65f7-0b73-4d8e-8045-0764341cf75b.jpg?alt=media&token=e22b8224-7162-4d40-a2a9-2aad2434316c","id":"cb5f65f7-0b73-4d8e-8045-0764341cf75b","width":3024,"height":4032,"filename":"IMG_2141.jpeg","type":"image/jpeg","caption":"","border":false}]}
```

Today I was at the London Bridge station and spotted this St Thomas street with a preconceived "share" meaning icon in front of it; wondering.. since when we're embedded the correlation meaning from this symbol to the abstract concept, such as "share,”?\
\
Remember when I was teaching my 72-year-old dad using Gmail on his phone. He was trying to learn how to forward an email to a client. For me, everything was so straightforward: a left-pointing arrow meant to reply, and a right-pointing arrow meant forward. I couldn’t remember when this incident occurred, yet back then, there was no existing text following the icons. We were talking over the phone, and after a few presses, he got lost and then confused by the Android system navigation from the app - it was a mess.\
\
There’s another memory of me teaching a 76-year-old well-educated Hong Kong lady to transfer money with her mobile banking. She has multiple bank services, and some of the banks select the receiver before the sender, and some do it the other way around, where she’s always confused.\
\
I’m not writing to judge a UI design or UX for elderly users. Still, I want to share that it was at these moments strikes me, realising that the meaning of iconography may only exist under a certain education level and or an age group. Some of the norm that we’re exposed everyday may not be the same to some people that the product is engaging with. That is why it’s so crucial for us, as a product designer, to know who we’re designing for and to ensure user testing with our target audience.

Iconography and its meaning

```cv
youtube
{"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UAsN9wvePE&t=4s","width":200,"height":113,"thumbnail":"https://i.ytimg.com/vi/8UAsN9wvePE/hqdefault.jpg"}
```

This video may give you enough reasons for why you may or may not hire me as your designer. 

Born and raised in an eastern Asian background, I culture-blend and self-taught a lot, trying to navigate through the work fields. Still, I mentally struggle with a lot of the preconceptions that my past experiences have put on me, and I inevitably try to please my surroundings when I can. 

The further I walked along the path, the more I realised that I was not alone in the struggle. Seeing people discuss the topic sheds light on the way, which gives me more ways of thinking about how and why to see myself.

How culture inform design decisions

I'm so slow, you probably don't have the time to get to know me