When the System Became the Product & Becoming a Beginner Again

Made with Midjourney

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, but there was a point where the products I started to work on were no longer just physical products. Increasingly, they were becoming connected systems tied to apps, dashboards, and remote monitoring. 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 a larger 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 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 what I wanted to do next, and the gaps in my skill set that would likely hinder career growth. Healthcare innovation was evolving quickly, and I realized I needed to evolve too.

As a single mom of a teenager, I also faced constraints that many traditional graduate students do not. Relocating for a full-time, in-person graduate program was not possible. So, I applied and was accepted to a mostly remote Human-Computer Interaction graduate program at the University of California, Irvine. In many ways, the structure of the program made growth in HCI possible. I could continue parenting while studying, attend lectures from home, work on my projects between consulting and caregiving, 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 was disorienting for me, and doing it remotely has added another layer entirely. Most days, my classroom exists through a screen. Critiques happen on Zoom. Brainstorming sessions take place in FigJam instead of around physical whiteboards. Collaboration happens asynchronously across schedules, time zones, jobs, and life obligations.

The remote structure also created an interesting mix of students. Some are very early in their careers. Others are pivoting industries. Many are balancing jobs, while attending school, 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 regular consulting contract, tapped into my savings, and committed fully to the program.

From Physical Products to Connected Systems

Earlier in my career, the focus was on the object: the device, the ergonomics, the materials and manufacturing constraints. Today, connected medical devices may include mobile apps, clinician dashboards, caregiver notifications, cloud-based data collection, 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 my peers relies a lot on animated GIFS, faceless Slack Huddles and FigJam emojis. It took me a while to get the hang of it. Gen Z is tech-native, but they are wary adopters of AI, and openly condemn the use of AI for creative work.

I am not so black and white.

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 less afraid of getting my hands dirty in the terminal. 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. However I have a different perspective about the use of AI for design work: after developing carpal tunnel syndrome from spending many years drawing in Ashlar Vellum, Solidworks, and Adobe Illustrator, 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 all the details manually in Figma. I also recently connected Rhino to Claude Code and have been experimenting with co-creating together in 3D.

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. 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.