For a long time, burnout had made design synonymous with frustration and force, and I needed a way to detach from that negative association.

I took a months-long break, avoiding it entirely. If an idea came to me, I noted it down, but made a conscious decision to step away from active design work. It was during this hiatus that I’d focused on transforming my daily habits so that when I returned to design, I’d have a supportive structure already in place to sustain my creative exploration.

By now, I’d transformed several habits and had learned to trust that once intention and focus were set in a particular area, meaningful guidance would eventually show up. This unpredictable nature of cosmic affordances taught me a valuable lesson in discipline.

For a few years now, for personal and professional projects, I’d worked in intense bursts followed by dejected periods of stagnation. When a spark of inspiration would hit, I’d drop everything to ride that wave. But when it dried up, I’d be left floundering, unsure when — or if — it would come back. As burnout worsened, that spark became increasingly rare.

So I set the intention to cultivate a consistent creative flow rather than continue relying on cyclical intensity. In the interim, I focused on building discipline with my current transformation containers. 

These gaps in between moments of cosmic inspiration became vital, ensuring that any changes I made were mindful, intentional, and lasting through dedicated practice.

*

One day, I woke up from an afternoon nap to the scent of simmering plums wafting through the house. Homemade plum jam was a staple of my childhood, and that scent swiftly took me back to carefree summer days spent playing, exploring, and causing a little mischief. As I was daydreaming about that long-ago life, my attention landed on the box of memories still sitting untouched in the corner of the room. Already in the throes of nostalgia, I decided to finally go through it.

Hidden under old photos and birthday cards, I found a book I’d bought years ago but never got around to reading: The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard — a philosophical exploration of memories and daydreams.

Feeling a familiar cosmic energy, I abandoned my rummaging in favor of curling up with the book while indulging in freshly baked bread and homemade plum jam.

As I read the first chapter, a passage gripped me: 

“Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.” (p. 6)

I kept returning to that phrase — a poetry that was lost. I couldn’t move past it. 

I dug back into my own box of memories and fished out an old hard drive from my days at Parsons. The project I was looking for was one I’d called Memoryplace.

Memories have always fascinated me. When I moved to a new country at age 10, besides a few personal mementos the only real possessions I’d brought with me were my memories. Speaking my mother tongue, Urdu, seemed to conjure memories vividly, but it was scent that really took me back. Plum jam, cardamom, pomegranate. Night-blooming jasmine and rose water. A poetry that was lost.

In 6th grade, I learned why. Scent is the strongest trigger for recalling memories because it activates the brain’s limbic system, which governs emotions and long-term memory. Unlike other senses that are processed through the neocortex, olfaction is unique in its direct pathway to the emotional center. 

After discovering this, I’d initiated a long-term experiment using different perfumes each school year as anchors to recall memories. This led to an interest in making scented candles as a way to capture meaningful moments. An expression of a poetry that was lost.

Memoryplace had also once been a deeply personal project where I explored a method of memory recall by embedding memories into objects placed in sketched structures of houses — sketches being an architect’s store of memory.

Back then, it was a one-dimensional exploration, but as I revisited it, I began rethinking the concept. If scent is the strongest connection between body-intelligence and mind-intelligence, how might this experience translate across other faculties?

In my design work, accessibility had primarily focused on translating visual interfaces for sight-impaired users. What might accessibility look like across different senses? For someone without a sense of smell, how might I translate scent-triggered memory recall through color or sound? 

While researching this line of thought, I came across a study about how the brains of congenitally blind individuals perceive visual concepts. 

The study revealed that for sighted people, color is processed straightforwardly — see red, think “red.” But for non-sighted people, mentioning a color activates the regions of the brain responsible for abstract thought. 

“The way they learn about red is the way [a sighted person] learn[s] about quarks, or about concepts like justice or virtue,” explained Alfonso Caramazza, the study’s co-author.

This reminded me of a challenge our design team once faced at Watermark. One of our designers was tasked with naming accessible color palette themes for ePortfolio templates. At the time, our best solution was to give practical examples: a palette with predominantly blue tones, for instance, might suit medical contexts. 

But considering the research study, our approach didn’t fully align with our intentions.

Accessibility isn’t just about providing information — it’s about creating an experience that’s equally meaningful for everyone. What if we’d approached that challenge from a more poetic, abstract lens, aligning more closely with how non-sighted users conceptualize colors?

As I was lost in these reflections, something clicked: my creative excitement was back, and showing me clearly what fuels my passion in my work — creative reciprocity between professional projects and personal explorations.

The frustration I’d come to associate with design was rooted in losing touch with what drew me to it in the first place: the joy of meaningful creative discovery. Over time, I’d grown too focused on outcomes and achievements, gradually losing the imaginative richness that once sustained my creativity. 

Our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

That’s what this entire journey was revealing — that design is more than just a job for me; it’s integral to who I am. 

It was as if I’d scattered these breadcrumbs for myself over the years. As if I’d somehow understood, though I didn’t know, that one day I would need to find my way back. And I was exactly where I needed to be to pick up that trail.

Plum jam daydreams and Memoryplace — points of connection in a boundless place.

After all, what is memory but compressed time and space?

*

I was thrilled to feel a creative spark again after what felt like an eternity. But from my experiences with other transformation containers, I knew that transitioning from intensity-driven bursts of creativity to a steady flow wouldn’t happen overnight. 

In the beginning, I held on to my preceding-state condition, only engaging in design when inspiration struck and intuition aligned. When it didn’t, I consciously let it be.

For months, I cycled between inspiration and stagnation, setting a new intention for anything that might help bridge the gap. Then at the dentist’s office one day, I overheard a patient telling the receptionist, “If you want to run a marathon, learn to paint.” 

That sentence echoed in my mind for the rest of the day.

Painting used to be a favorite hobby, but like design in recent years, I’d grown impatient with the process and overly fixated on the result.

The next day I met a friend for a picnic in the park. She brought along a paint-by-numbers kit for us to work on while we chatted. And just like that, the answer appeared. 

I’d never thought much of paint-by-numbers, dismissing them as “uninspiring.” But the methodical, consistent work without the expectation of “achieving” anything grand was exactly the discipline I needed to rebuild.

When we started our sessions, Fran had given me a book: The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle. The book explores the science behind talent development, showing how practicing adjacent skills often enhances the primary skill being mastered.

The book gives an example of Brazilian soccer players who practice by playing futsal, a high-intensity version of soccer played on smaller, concrete courts. The game’s constraints of limited space, high pressure, and a smaller, heavier ball force players to sharpen their decision-making and develop refined ball control — skills that translate directly to traditional soccer.

In a similar vein, paint-by-numbers provided me with a low-pressure environment to rebuild my creative discipline with a relaxed, almost meditative re-engagement. Both activities support skill development, just on opposing ends of the spectrum — intensity vs. ease, high pressure vs. low — each fostering a return to creative flow in its own way.

When I felt inspired, I worked on research and design for Memoryplace. In between, I switched to paint-by-numbers, devoting consistent time to each practice.

I also noticed a distinction between my personal projects and professional work that I hadn’t considered before: for my personal, inspired projects, I’d always chosen Figma, while all the teams I’d worked with professionally used Sketch. In my experience, Figma’s strong design community made it a more inviting world for designing.

Design worlds, as Donald Schön once described, are “environments entered into and inhabited by designers when designing. They contain particular configurations of things, relations and qualities, and they act as holding environments for design knowledge.” (Designing: Rules, Types, and Worlds)

Sketch was the design world that — through no fault of its own — had come to hold my resigned frustration. To signal a fresh start, I committed to Figma as my design homeworld. 

This shift also translated the paint-by-numbers habit-building process to active design work. Between moments of inspired work, I systematically transferred years of professional work from Sketch into Figma — reorganizing and refamiliarizing myself with the material in the process. 

When I had rediscovered Memoryplace, I’d also unearthed a collection of mini mobile games I’d worked on during my Parsons days. These games were a creative escape that sometimes led to unexpected sparks of inspiration. 

I brought them back into my design world by making them a regular part of my process.

With this blend of inspired work, disciplined practice, and playful creativity, my return to design was fully realized.

*

In my journey of personal development, because of the resource tradeoffs I committed to (leaving the job and the apartment), I was able to leave time as an open-ended variable. This flexibility allowed me to experiment with my framework in ways that aren’t always possible in more structured, professional settings. 

But even in those contexts, this approach can be adopted: by letting inspiration and cosmic affordances guide major breakthroughs while committing to smaller, strategic initiatives in the interim. This helps avoid the trap of forcing premature actions and selecting outcomes that misalign with our true intentions. 

Another vital aspect of this process was a demonstrated commitment to the desire for change. Sartre once said, “Whenever man chooses his commitment and his project in a totally sincere and lucid way, it is impossible for him to prefer another.” 

Finding that lucid commitment requires tuning into our true expression and aligning with the outcome that resonates most deeply, allowing the authentic path to unfold naturally rather than forcing it through logic alone.

Habits, behaviors, and self-beliefs — those grooves in the brain dug repeatedly over years — aren’t easily changed. But with time and consistent practice, my many little transformation containers built up a stable home for my creative flow.