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Activist

I love having a sense of purpose. My Design education has honed me to distill complex messages into simple ones, and one can analogize that your life is a jumble of so many different messages, that when you apply information design concepts to it, you develop a few simple messages. One of these messages, in my personal history, has always been serving the community. I figure that if I work on too many things and become spread thin, it will make my work less impactful. What exactly do I want to do to help the Vietnamese community?

"I am on a mission to stop the reinvention of wheels." i.e. Connect ideas with ideas in order to minimize unnecessary replicated work. In essence, it sounds like I want to work in some form of mass communication, such as journalism. Journalism is concerned with what is new, but I am interested in what exists, data mining the community in a way. I suppose I would become a publisher and researcher. It doesn't sound as glamorous as fighting human trafficking or modernizing classroom education, and maybe even then I need to pick an issue to fight. But no matter what I do, I always seem to fall into the same trap of helping all causes because of the interconnectedness of all issues.

But I guess there are a few areas of involvement I have an interest in:

• Contemporary Classroom Education - Updating our education system for the Information Age by creating a fundamental curriculum and integration process to train students with information tools.
• Human Trafficking - Ending abuses and exploitation of human beings in this modern day form of slavery.
• Information Anxiety - Establishing software tools that can reduce the information overload in our daily lives.
• Mass Transportation - How to get around efficiently and minimizing impact on the environment.
• Vietnamese-American Heritage Preservation - Passing on the legacy of the Vietnamese-American community to future generations.

Things I’ve Learned As An Activist

• Nonprofits and businesses are two sides of the same coin: one focuses the purpose and direction, while the other focuses on the means and outcome.