A left-handed engineer: pt.2
By: Emilijan Sekulovski
Tags: Design Thinking, Self Reflection, Product Design, Self Development, User Experience

Being left-handed is easily one of the things that, on first thought, doesn’t seem significant enough, let alone life-changing. However, it has a tremendous impact on how one interacts with the world, from everyday objects to interactions with other people.

Interacting with everyday objects generally has no benefits whatsoever for a left-handed person. In a world predominantly built for right-handed people, a left-handed person is often forced to act as right-handed. Therefore, undoubtedly the single biggest benefit is ambidexterity. Lefties are known to be much more ambidextrous than the average right-hander. As I’m writing this, I realized that my entire life, I use my right hand to handle zippers on pants and jackets, and this should fascinate me. This example alone is so extraordinary that it could be a representation of how we people attune to the norms.

When I was 8 years old, my parents started taking me to tennis classes. I immediately fell in love with the sport. Two-three times a week, my parents would take me to the tennis courts, watch me practice, and we would come back home. During summertime, we would often stay on the beach to have a swim and watch the sunset. The tennis courts were right beside the beach. All five of us would go, my parents, my younger twin siblings, and I. Ivo and Ivona, the twins, they later practiced tennis themselves, at the same tennis school. Now, being a parent myself, I am grateful and admire the devotion of my parents, regardless of the weather or their busy work schedule, to always find the time to take us to play tennis. Every week, every drive, full of excitement and anticipation on the way there, and feeling exhausted, sweaty, and yet completely satisfied on the way back. I will never forget those days.

Me in front of the tennis court at age of 8 (exact location)

I took tennis classes for several years, and it was my coach Micho who first pointed out to me that being left-handed could be quite advantageous over right-handed people in many sports, including tennis. When I was 14–15, I also tried handball for a year. That coach said the same thing about being left-handed. Occasionally, I would play a game of basketball or football with my friends. Nothing too spectacular. Actually, I’m quite certain I’ve spent more time playing sports video games than doing actual sports.

Around the same age, during my 7th and 8th grade at primary school, we were introduced to computers and the basics of informatics. We were using 8-inch floppy disks and monochrome monitors. I remember we would play some games, finish some simple programming tasks, and learn the basics about computers: what they are, how they work, and what they are used for. This was easily my favorite class at school. This attraction to technology stayed during my high school years. I was one of the teacher’s favorite students, helping her by assisting other students during the class. This is where I learned to program with Turbo Pascal. It included a compiler and an IDE (an integrated development environment) for the Pascal programming language. I got familiar with the basic program structure, discovered all the different data types, conditional statements, loops, functions, procedures, objects, and classes. Naturally, after all of this time spent around computers, plus a mother professor of Basics of Informatics (European equivalent for computer science), I decided to pursue an engineering career by enrolling in the bachelor degree studies on Informatics and Computer Engineering at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, in Skopje.

I hope in pt.3 we will touch upon the beginnings of my design and human-centered thinking days.

Back to pt.1