One philosophy underpins designer Ji Park’s eclectic practice – “fuck around and find out”

“If there even is any philosophy to my practice… it’s basically: fuck around and find out,” Ji Park says. “All jokes aside, if you don’t fuck around, you’ll never actually find out.” A designer, developer and self-professed farmer, the Brooklyn-based creative is a curious, eclectic practitioner, challenging not only her own interests – be it ecology, technology or food – but also the principles of her disciplines. 

Through experimentation and play, Ji interrogates and mismatches genres, situating herself within a unique practice at the crossroads of design, development, strategy and branding. “I think design is inherently interdisciplinary,” she says, “it’s non-linear and messy by nature.” The friends and creatives Ji looks up to are never purely designers: “they’re programmers who write poems, strategists who forage, technologists who are also beekeepers,” she says, which results in work that exists within in-between spaces. “I want to learn everything about food, farming, climate, design, technology, each shift pushes me” Ji says. “The more I learn, the more I see that design, or really, any meaningful work, is about understanding systems, relationships, and the way people move through the world.”

Ji’s journey into design is one that is in part responsible for her insatiable pursuit of information. “I wish I had an interesting lore, like coding my first web art at nine or building my first software in middle school or something like that,” Ji says, “but unfortunately, I was just a loser who was chronically online.” Ji grew up with no screen time limits, parental controls or, indeed, restrictions of any kind. “Luckily, being terminally online eventually turned into an appreciation for programming and visual language of the web,” Ji adds. By the time college applications rolled around, she realised that what she’s been obsessed with fell under the category of graphic design. “So I took the formal route,” Ji ends, “I went to art school in New York, and became a graphic designer.”