When the System Became the Product: Becoming a beginner again midlife
I spent most of my career designing physical things. Architectural hardware, kitchen housewares, home accessories and food packaging. Interfaces people could hold in their hands.
As an industrial designer, I was trained to think about form, ergonomics, materials, manufacturing, usability, workflows, and human behavior. Later, I brought those skills into healthcare, designing medical devices and systems for hospitals and vulnerable patient populations. Much of my work happened inside academic hospitals, where design failures are not just frustrating, they can impact safety, stress, and care outcomes.
For many years, that skillset was enough for me, but I saw that healthcare was changing. The products I started to work on were no longer just physical products. Increasingly, they were becoming connected systems tied to apps, dashboards, remote monitoring, cloud infrastructure, AI-assisted workflows, and digital ecosystems. The “product” was no longer simply the device sitting on a countertop, rolling around the operating room or attached to a patient. The product had become an entire experience.
The summer of 2025, I was laid off from my role as the Biodesign Program Director at Children’s National Hospital along with my mentor/boss who was the a VP and Head of Innovation at the hospital. I had been there over four years, and was very depressed about the situation. It was one of those moments that forced me to look closely at our country’s academic funding situation, the state of technology and gaps in my skill set. Healthcare innovation was evolving quickly, and I realized I needed to evolve with it.
As a single mother of a teenager, I also faced constraints that many traditional graduate students do not. Relocating for a full-time, in-person graduate program was simply not realistic. My son had a life, a school, friendships, stability, and roots that mattered. I could not just uproot everything and move across the country to sit in a design studio again.
So, I enrolled in the mostly remote Human-Computer Interaction graduate program at the University of California, Irvine.
In many ways, the structure of the program made the transition possible. I could continue parenting while studying. I could attend lectures from home, work on projects late at night after dinner, and collaborate remotely with classmates while still managing the realities of everyday life. It has not been easy, but it has been possible.
Returning to School in a Remote World
Going back to graduate school midlife is already disorienting, but doing it remotely adds another layer entirely.
Most days, my classroom existed through a screen. Group critiques happened on Zoom. Brainstorming sessions took place in Figma and FigJam instead of around physical whiteboards. Collaboration happened asynchronously across schedules, time zones, jobs, caregiving responsibilities, and life obligations.
The remote structure also created an interesting mix of students. Some were early in their careers. Others were pivoting industries. Many were balancing full-time jobs, while attending school. Unlike traditional graduate programs where students fully disappear into campus life, this program felt more connected to the day-to-day realities of adult professional life, as many students chose to continue to work at least part time, including myself, however that all changed Quarter 2 when I came down with various health issues at once and realized they were all stress-induced. I quit my job, tapped into my savings and committed fully to my coursework.
From Physical Products to Connected Systems
One of the biggest shifts for me at Children’s National Hospital was realizing how much the role of industrial design itself had changed. Earlier in my career, the focus was often on the object: the device, the ergonomics, the manufacturing constraints, the physical interaction. Today, healthcare products increasingly live inside larger digital ecosystems. A connected medical device may now include mobile onboarding, clinician dashboards, caregiver notifications, cloud-based data collection, remote patient monitoring, and AI-generated insights. Boundaries between industrial design, UX design, service design, and systems design have started to blur. Going back to graduate school was my way of learning how to work across those boundaries.
Becoming a beginner, again.
Returning to school later in life is humbling. Attending virtual classrooms, participating in discussions and working on group projects with students young enough to be my children has been challenging and surprising. The communication style of Gen Z relies a lot on animated GIFS, faceless Slack Huddles and FigJam emojis. It took me a while to get a hang of it. As much as this generation is tech-native, they are wary adopters of AI even condemn the use of AI for creative work.
Meanwhile, I have become fascinated with AI tools and use them everyday, literally living between Figma, Cursor, GitHub, Claude and Netifly. I find the workflow extraordinary, and with my new coding skills (thanks to Professor Epstein at UC Irvine and my Wyzant coding tutor) I have become far less afraid of getting my hands dirty in the terminal. My youthful peers on the other hand seem less enthusiastic about the capabilities of AI. It’s obvious to me that off-loading the thinking to AI is not the way to go. The thinking is the fun part anyway. After developing carpal tunnel syndrome from spending years drawing in CAD, I genuinely appreciate being able to offload repetitive production tasks like component states, buttons, and prototype flows. It allows me to iterate more quickly, explore a wider range of ideas, and focus my energy on refining the concepts that feel close before tweaking details in Figma.
Midlife Adaptation in a Changing Industry
There is a misconception that experienced professionals eventually “arrive” and no longer need to evolve. Technology makes that impossible. AI, connected devices, remote care systems, predictive analytics, and digital therapeutics are reshaping the healthcare field (and many others) in real time. Designers like me, who spent decades creating physical products, are now expected to understand software ecosystems, data infrastructures, and human-computer interaction.
Returning to graduate school was not some romantic midlife reinvention. It was a pragmatic adaptation to where healthcare is headed. Increasingly, the future belongs to designers who can bridge physical and digital experiences into coherent systems because, in healthcare today, the system is the product.
As a woman pursuing my third degree in design, I feel a growing responsibility to apply the skills I have spent decades developing toward shaping the future of healthcare, particularly for vulnerable populations. At this stage of my life, the work feels less like ambition and more like a responsibility I feel privileged to carry. I am very grateful for the opportunity to pursue a master’s degree in human-computer interaction and look forward to bringing these new skills into my next professional chapter when I graduate later this year.
