The year 2025 reinforced a valuable life lesson and mindset. It asked me to look within and around at what I can and can’t control. It was a tumultuous and chaotic year, personally and professionally. Still, it emboldened me with a firmly rooted perspective — I can’t control what anyone else is doing, but I can control how I respond to it. My agency and integrity are my responsibility. A lesson that reverberates as we are halfway into 2026.
The Deeper Root
While 2025 crystallized and rooted this notion, its pull had been there since I was a young designer. It’s what led me to the CDC, but I didn’t have a name for it. I needed my work to mean something. I would question whether what I was doing was contributing to some larger force, and maybe not a good one. Was my work littering landfills? Manipulating the choices people made?
In 2024, Kelly Small’s book Conscious Creative gave language to what had been building in me all along. Small defines a conscious creative as someone who practices ethical design, making choices that support people and the planet, not just the bottom line.
I felt I could be doing more meaningful work, and I’m at a similar crossroads now. Except now, I know what to call it. It’s what led me to graduate school — and it’s evolving.
Welcome to Graduate School
The course I’m in now is deepening what it means to be a conscious creative. This semester, I’ve been asked to look at my own relationship with tech and been introduced to the concept of humane technology through the Center for Humane Technology (CHT). CHT is a nonprofit dedicated to bringing clarity to the technology ecosystem, including AI and social media, to transform incentives that produce system-level change.
There’s a project on the horizon that’s framed around CHT’s core mission. With it comes a question I’m asking — as content creators, how can we exist inside a framework that’s built against us and become a force for change within? I’m building on what it means to me to be a conscious creative alongside the mission of humane technology and translating it into something usable for other creators.
The Pledge
I didn’t expect this throughline to keep showing up. It’s inviting me to take it a step further. I’m holding myself accountable with my own agency and integrity and using it to create something for others. And soon, I’ll have tools for you to do the same.
This is my pledge as a creator. I’m saying it out loud. I can’t control what others are doing, but I can control how I respond to it. I can control how I create within the ecosystem. Turning this into a practice, not just a mindset.
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