Personal Statements allow second-year design graduate students the opportunity to combine a physical product that is imbued with their emotions and values with a shared user experience. Here Kel Huang shares her path to the d.school and her 2026 Personal Statement project in her own words.
The shift from materials to systems thinking
After graduating from my undergrad in chemistry, I was working at the USDA, where I worked on projects about bioplastics and sustainable materials in consumer products. But I was always curious about the bigger picture: it often felt like just changing the material of a product wasn’t enough. The systems, behaviors, and attitudes of people had to also change in order for a solution to work.
That led me to a role teaching sustainable design at UC Berkeley, and eventually I decided that I wanted to go back to school to dive deep into design and spend time developing my own ways of thinking about these challenges.
Now that I’m in my second year, I’ve found some really great ways of integrating my prior experience in science with my new skillset as a designer. My thesis focuses on documenting the ways scientists use metaphors and changing cultural norms around metaphor use across scientific disciplines. I explore this through workshops, experiences, and print media.
Additionally, I’ve also worked on several projects which explore the topic of meditation and contemplative practice through the design of audio, installation, and ritual experiences.
Transforming and Ttrusting my design process
The MS Design program has been a transformative part of my design journey, in that I’ve really developed my own design process and intuition over the last two years. At the start of the program, I was much less comfortable with ambiguous parts of doing design work and would rely on the precise design phases I learned in school.
Now I’ve gotten much better at knowing what steps I need to take to get unstuck at any moment in the project (and also knowing that getting stuck is a part of the process). I think this came out most of all in my Personal Statements work, and why I feel that the complete experience, not just the final outcome, represents my growth as a designer.
And of course, it was an opportunity to “come of age” together with my beloved friends in my cohort. The community we’ve formed through this program is something I’ll cherish long beyond our time at Stanford.
The women who came before me
Personal Statements is an annual tradition of the MS Design program, and it was my favorite night of my first year. It’s a project that invites you to dive deeply into a familiar medium to refine an expression of yourself as a designer. I loved watching the projects of my second years come to life, and the way the whole loft community came together to make magic. I felt like this was a really rare experience to dedicate two whole weeks to intensely focusing and creating something meaningful to me, so I knew I wanted to go all in and explore a really personal topic: my name.
In Spring 2025, fresh off the heels of the previous year’s Personal Statement, I began thinking about changing my name. “Kelly Chou” had served me well as a name for my whole life, but since beginning the program, I began to feel a rift with the life I had once pictured for myself.
I decided I wanted to change my last name to Huang, my mom and my grandma’s last name. I had long admired the tenacity and grit of the two women who raised me, and I wanted to claim my place within their lineage.
But how to do it? I understood that there was a legal process behind this, but I didn’t want the process to just be a matter of paperwork. For my Personal Statement, I decided to set out to create a transformation ritual that would prepare me for a new life as a Huang Woman.
Letting the design find its own form
I struggled to find the right form for a long time. I was most inspired by Félix González-Torres’ work, “Untitled” (Golden), which is a wall-length, sparkling curtain made of thousands of golden beads. I experienced this piece many years ago and always loved it as an expression of what transformation is: a passage through a soft barrier. The beads let you catch a small glimpse of the other side, and they move a lot whenever someone passes through.
Beads are also a medium I’ve worked in before, and they hold a strong significance in my Buddhist meditation practice. So I knew I wanted beads to play a role in the piece, but I wasn’t satisfied with most of the initial ideas I came up with.
I ended up taking a more emergent approach, where my initial focus was to create a long strand of individually hand-knotted beads. This ended up being the most meaningful part of the process for me, and I got to spend lots of time reflecting on the significance of the name change and my journey to this point. After about 500 beads strung, I started thinking of each bead like a day in my life, getting strung together one by one. Each individual bead was almost insignificant, but they all added up into something I could only see later.
In the end, I came up with the final form of the beads (a layered ceremonial necklace) in the last 10 hours before the showcase.
A conversation about identity and belonging
Personal Statements 2026 was one of the most special nights of my life. It was incredible sharing this moment with my friends, my mentors, and most of all, my mom. She flew all the way from my hometown in SoCal to come to the showcase.
I also got to hear many stories of people’s names and their relationships/understandings of names through the night: whether it was a choice to change their name themselves, deciding how to name their children, or family stories of changing names when immigrating to the United States.
I always knew that names hold special meaning, that’s why I decided to change mine even though I was already a “Huang Woman” all along. But I think hearing so many people’s stories made me realize that there is an old story of the importance of “passing down the family name” (typically from father to son), but reality is not so straightforward.
People change their names for all sorts of reasons: oftentimes, it’s about survival or conforming to standards. But it can also be a celebration of new beginnings, and a powerful way to choose how you show up in the world.
If you’re interested in working together or learning more about my work, please don’t hesitate to reach out. You can find me on Linkedin or Instagram.