About

Hi! I’m Nina. Welcome to Up As I Go!

I’m Nina and I love creating things! From my personal to academic to professional life, I’m continually creating things and problem solving. On weekends and evenings, you can often find me experimenting with vegetarian recipes, DIY crafts, organization solutions, board games, and more. Academically, I studied product design and mechatronics, where I designed user experiences and built robots. And now, I professionally create products, and have had the pleasure to design the hardware for smartphones and tablets, as well as the experience for in-vehicle heads up displays and virtual reality entertainment experiences for hospitalized kids.

I design with an engineering mindset. In fact, I believe that engineering and design are one and the same–both are mindsets for problem-solving. However, that wasn’t always the case.

Growing up, I did a lot of craft projects with my family. From sewing clothes to designing a speed typing computer application to crafting annual holiday gifts, I was drawn to learning new skills and applying them to making. Though as middle school came around, I was told that I couldn’t make a living creating art. By high school, as a strong student in math and science, I was hearing that I should be an engineer. Not knowing what engineering really was, I told myself that it was the last thing I wanted. What I didn’t realize was that the projects I had been doing my entire childhood were both engineering and design projects.

During my freshman year of college, the lightbulb went on in my head. My selected major, product design, was everything I could have dreamed of as a combination of art and mechanical engineering classes. Throughout my college years, I was creating yet again, but this time also studying the theories behind making. I learned to cast bronze, weld steel, turn aluminum, and build full user experiences with pixels on a screen.

I see engineering and design as approaches to problem-solving. Whether sewing a dress or building a robot or designing a website or creating a recipe, one requires creativity to solve the problem at hand. Up As I Go is a showcase of some of my projects. I hope you enjoy!

In addition to these projects, I also have an online shop called Curly Bracket Design, where I share printable motivational posters and greeting cards.

Disclosures

This blog uses affiliate links. So, if you click on one of my product links, I may get reimbursed.