About Me — Joey Chan. Human-centred Designer, Photographer &…
By: Joey Chan
Tags: About Me, Entrepreneurship, Photographer, Bio, Designer

The Longer Version: Origin story

To fully appreciate who I am now, I’d like to share where I’m from. I feel like I should start there to provide context and a better understanding of who I am, what I do and what I’m working on.

I was born in Hong Kong to a middle-class family. We had enough to live comfortably but my parents wanted my sister and I to grow up without the high-stress and pressures of the Hong Kong education system which is notoriously competitive and depressing for students. Plus, it was trendy in the 90s to migrate to a Western country like the United States, Canada and Australia. We chose Brisbane, Australia.

It wasn’t until I relocated to a different state as an adult that I appreciated the courage and bravery that it took for my parents to uproot their lives and move to a different country. As fresh migrants, we had to learn everything about our new home —the history, a new language, way of life and ways to make a living. Remembering that these were the days when the World Wide Web was just made available to the public (1994) and four years before Google was even founded (1998), you can imagine how much more difficult it was to do all those things without information being available at your fingertips. You try living a day without your mobile phone and laptop and see how far you get.

As an 8 year-old being dragged out of bed by my parents at 3am to set up shop at the flea markets every weekend taught me a few things. My parents imported all kinds of things from China to sell at the markets in Australia – kids toys, fashion jewellery, women’s wear, sports apparel, Chinese New Year decorations, tea sets and incense ornaments. I witnessed the entrepreneurial process of trial and error very early on. And no matter if the day’s earnings were good or bad, they still showed up week after week. They persisted with the markets for over 15 years on top of having full-time jobs and running a small retail business. I have my parents to thank for showing me resilience, persistence and the value of commitment.

I understood why my parent’s nudged me towards a more professional career path. I think showing us early on the kind of laborious work they did served as a message of “what not to do”. So I grew up around the idea that to live a more comfortable life, you need to go to university and become a professional. That I did! After high school, I traded my dream of being a creative to pursue law because that was what a good respectful daughter does. After 6 years of studies, I reluctantly became a lawyer. But to my parent’s disappointment, that lasted only a year.

I left a stable in-house lawyer job for…well, I didn’t know what exactly it was for at the time. I just knew there were so many more exciting things out there for me. It was a really hard thing to do — to crush my parent’s dream of having a lawyer in the family. It felt like everything they sacrificed to move to Australia was for nothing. Still, I convinced myself that if my little venture fails, I could always go back to law. So, off I went to explore other careers: I co-founded a marketing agency, sold properties, hosted events, became a digital strategist and then landed on my feet as a human-centred designer.

What I do…

‘So, what do you do?’

This is a cocktail question I disliked more and more over the years. Telling people my job title felt superficial and inauthentic because I knew I was so much more than my job description. I was more than the corporate professional facade, an armour I put on to blend in with everyone else around me at the time. It was worse when I ran into acquaintances that I saw at a corporate event some months or years ago and felt the need to explain how I ended up with the current role I was in. Nonetheless, these job titles and labels reflect the society’s need to logically understand your place and the box you fit into. But I didn’t quite fit into one box and felt quite insecure about my career because of it.

Something magical happens when you turn 30 — you start to care less about what people think. Your childhood insecurities have less hold over you because you realise that everyone else is just like you: someone who is figuring out life and doing the best we can with what we have. Having embraced how diverse (or “beautifully messy”) my career has been, I can confidently tell you that I’m a specialised generalist and this is what I do.

I help define and solve problems for people and businesses through human-centred design.

Design thinking workshop in progress.

What I have developed over the years is the ability to tap into my left brain (logical thinking) and right brain (intuitive, creative thinking) which has proven to be a great fit in management consulting. If you must know, I am an ‘Innovation Consultant’ which is just a fancy catch-all title for creative problem-solvers in the corporate world. We’re often armed with a colourful supply of Post-Its, Sharpies and an unhealthy amount of snacks — for all the design thinking workshop participants of course. I practice human-centred design, a creative approach that starts with understanding the people you’re designing for through behavioural and contextual research, defining a problem, brainstorming and prototyping possible solutions, and ends with new solutions that address the specific needs of those people. I’ve worked on projects about designing new experiences for customers (CX) and employees (EX), as well as helping companies with their digital transformation (e.g. automating manual processes, business process improvement and implementing agile ways of working).

Besides Post-Its, my favourite thing about this work is facilitating people’s creative thinking. Seeing the excitement and joy on people’s faces when they come up with new ideas and develop their creative confidence is very fulfilling for me.

I take photos for couples, families and businesses who want to capture emotive moments.

Images by the Author.

Since I was young, I have been fascinated by the way a photograph can freeze reality. They can transport people back in time and re-experience a moment. I wanted this superpower: the ability to make people feel the feelings of another person. Photography was always thrown into the hobby/do-when-I-have-time basket because I figured that any type of creative pursuit wasn’t going to be accepted as a “real job”. This was the consequence of growing up in a family and culture that prioritises academics and S.T.E.M subjects over the arts, humanities and more creative disciplines. Determined to break away from this flawed thinking, I kept this hobby alive by volunteering to be the photographer at student and corporate events. I also fell in love with using film and collected a bunch of film cameras over the years.

Photography became an income-producing activity two years ago as my friends and family started to get engaged/pregnant/have babies and I have become one of the go-to content creators at my workplace. I’ve curated some of my favourite film photos on my Instagram @herstoriesonfilm and my digital portfolio can be found here.

I write stories about personal development, entrepreneurship and behavioural science.

Speaking to students about my unconventional career path at the University of Queensland in 2019.

The writing process (reading, researching, thinking, developing ideas) satisfies my insatiable curiosity for human behaviour and how the world works — why, how, what we do/think/feel. It was hard to narrow it down to a handful of topics to write about because my interests span across so many things: business, leadership, psychology, social issues, creativity, design and personal finance.

What I want to get out of writing is to develop this as a habit so that I can work towards my vision of spreading ideas that inspire and help people do great things. Writing on Medium is just the first step to achieving this vision. Will there be a book, podcast, Youtube channel or public speaking in the future? Maybe you’ll find out when I update my bio next time. In the meantime, I’m sharing my writing journey as I go if you’d like to follow along.

What’s Next?

Despite the pandemic this year, I found love and ticked off a major goal of mine: to live in another city. My move to Melbourne marks a significant milestone and it’s exciting to dream about all the possibilities this will bring. Living through the fear and uncertainty brought on by the economical consequences of COVID-19 made me realise that I need to start designing a better lifestyle. The silver lining to being in lockdown was having the time to be still and recalibrate, such that I’ve become more motivated than ever to do all the things I want to do and be all the things I want to be. So, some of the things I will be doing:

Read widely, think deeply & write more consistently

Explore new places and capture all the moments on film

Create products, launch ideas and “ship creative work” as Seth Godin puts it.

“Shipping, because it doesn’t count if you don’t share it. Creative, because you’re not a cog in the system. You’re a creator, a problem solver, a generous leader who is making things better by producing a new way forward. Work, because it’s not a hobby. You might not get paid for it, not today, but you approach it as a professional. The muse is not the point, excuses are avoided, and the work is why you are here.”

― Seth Godin, The Practice: Shipping Creative Work

If you’ve come this far, THANK YOU and I’d like to get to know you too. Drop a note here so that I can read your work! ✌🏼

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