Designed
to Feel
MEMOIR | CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY | STORYTELLING
One life, designed from the inside out.
Scope
First book; memoir + manifesto on belonging, grief, love, and design
Year
2025
Duration
Decades of journaling
Backstory
For as long as I can remember, I’ve carried notebooks full of questions, memories, and truths too big for silence. Writing became my way to understand grief, migration, creativity, and belonging. Designed to Feel (2025) is the book I promised my grandfather I would one day write — a blueprint for building a life from the inside out. It is part memoir, part manifesto, shaped by years of journaling and an experiment in human–AI collaboration. I wrote it as both a record of becoming and as a love letter to my family, my future children, and especially to my grandfather, who reminded me — even as memory slipped away — that I had promised to write.
The book explores universal questions:
How do we design a life we can feel in our bones?
What does it mean to belong when home is scattered across countries, languages, and generations?
How can creativity and technology expand, rather than replace, human truth?
At a time when AI is shaping new creative frontiers, I wanted to show that machine intelligence can be a partner in deep human storytelling — helping shape and refine without ever erasing the author’s voice.
The Inspiration
To bring this vision to life, I wove together years of journals, essays, and reflections into a five-part structure: Drafting the Frame, Iterating in Real Time, What Breaks / What Stays, Designing from Wholeness, and Epilogue. Along the way, I used AI-assisted tools to refine chapters, edit language, and even generate the cover art — an experiment in blending memory, intuition, and creative technology. The book was first printed in May 2025, shared both as a personal gift to my grandfather and as a published work for a wider audience
Process
My mission was to honor the emotional fluency of design — treating life itself as a system that can be built with care, texture, and rhythm. Designed to Feel is not about perfection, but about feeling: designing homes out of memory and ritual, designing belonging across distance and loss, and designing futures rooted in figureoutability and softness.
Mission
←The precious figma file for cover artwork
Intro
Chapters
More than a memoir, Designed to Feel is a testament to resilience and rebecoming. For my grandfather, it is proof that promises can outlast time. For me, it is a record of how grief, love, and creativity shape identity. And for others, it is an invitation to slow down, listen, and design a life that feels like home.