About Me — Darya Daneshmand

Why I’m Here, A Few Thinkers I Trust, and What I’m Building Toward

Photo taken by my dad, Said

This is an About Me, but it’s also a window into the kinds of questions that won’t leave me alone.

I’m Darya. I just wrapped up my master’s in design at Northwestern, where I learned how to build across product disciplines — and how to sit with uncertainty long enough to find form in it.

My graduate thesis began with a question: Why do we creatives lose some of our most important ideas?

It unraveled into many more.

1. What makes an idea worth resurfacing?
2. What happens to the ideas we never revisit?
3. How do we externalize memory while staying cognitively present?
4. What does it mean to be a ‘good ancestor’ to your future self’s thinking?
5. In what ways does an interface subtly shape the direction of our thinking?

The product I designed tried to answer some of these questions, but I didn’t walk away with closure — just a sharper intuition for where to keep digging.

What I’m drawn to

Creative ideation is inherently nonlinear, fluid, messy. I’m most excited by tools and environments that make room for the mess…