🧠 What I Took Away

Design isn’t always about sleek interfaces or polished decks. Sometimes, it’s sitting on the floor with crayons, reworking an activity because it didn’t land, or staying back after class because a kid wants to share how they feel.

It’s noticing when a child moves from silent to expressive. From withdrawn to engaged. That’s when you know the design is working.

Because real design doesn’t always happen on screens. It happens in the messy, beautiful middle between people and their experiences.

🏁 How It Started

In the middle of an ordinary art session, one of the kids quietly said to me:

"I can’t take this drawing home. My dad might hit me."

That moment landed harder than any lesson plan ever could.

It made it clear that while art was giving these kids a voice, they didn’t always have a safe space to use it. That’s when Mad Over Art became more than just a volunteer project. It turned into a mission to create emotional safe spaces, using creativity as a doorway to healing, connection, and personal growth.

🧩 My Role

As co-founder and program lead, I worked closely with educators and psychologists to design how we introduced Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) concepts to children. I wasn’t just teaching, I was designing experiences.

• Co-developed learning modules centered around empathy, self-awareness, and emotional expression

• Validated content through live workshops and sessions with kids, constantly iterating for cultural and emotional relevance

• Adapted tone, pacing, and formats in real time based on feedback to improve accessibility and engagement

👩🏻‍💻Where UX came in

Without officially calling it “UX,” I was practicing it every single day.

• Research: Observing classroom dynamics and how children emotionally responded

• Iteration: Adjusting activities, language, and tools after each session based on what worked

• Co-design: Collaborating with children and educators to test and refine new ideas

• Accessibility: Ensuring every activity could work across language barriers, literacy levels, and emotional readiness

This hands-on, human-centered approach helped turn sessions into experiences that weren’t just educational — they were genuinely transformative.

📈 Impact

• Children began creating their own reflection tools. One group even made a “Feelings Fortune Teller” to express how they felt

• Increased classroom participation, emotional articulation, and peer empathy

⚙️ What’s Next

While my main focus remains on growing as a product designer, I’m also exploring ways to digitally scale these activities as a passion project. Tools like Notion and Figma are helping us build a small resource library for grassroots educators, and I’m casually prototyping story-based learning flows that could one day be powered by AI, but always grounded in emotional intelligence. It’s a side hustle I care about, something I continue to evolve in my own time.

👋 Final Thought

If design is about solving problems with empathy and intention, then Mad Over Art is where I truly learned what it means to design, by listening, adapting, and making kids feel seen.