2025 Personal Statement Highlights: Arianne Spaulding
Stanford d.school
Everyone has the capacity to be creative. At the d.school, people use design to develop their creative potential.
We're excited to share some of the Personal Statements of our second-year design graduate students. Every year, students are asked to develop a work that uniquely represents who they are. They then share this work with the rest of our design community on a special night. This project allows the designers to combine a physical product imbued with their emotions and values with a shared user experience.
This year, attendees enjoyed a wide range of artifacts and experiences, including an olive oil tasting, a suspended performance, a QR-coded Love Quilt, and the bending of light. This series will highlight the students' experience creating their statements, allowing them to share more with the design community in their own words.
Next, we highlight Arianne Spaulding's Personal Statement, "Love Quilt." Read more below.
Introduction
I've always had a wide range of interests that, at times, seemed impossible to combine into one path. My love for both math and art led me to engineering—where I could blend analytical thinking with creativity—but meant leaving behind some of my other interests, like psychology, nature, textiles, and storytelling. I’d been exposed to design during my undergraduate education, but it took several years of working as a mechanical engineer for me to appreciate the significance of this holistic approach. I love solving tangible problems, and I also find myself drawn to systems thinking and the broader implications of my design choices. My curiosity about interconnected systems pushed me to pursue my graduate degree at Stanford, and I couldn’t be happier with my choice. I’ve been lucky to take classes across many disciplines, including law, sustainability, business, and psychology. Even better, I’ve had the time, space, and support from the d.school to create connections from these interdisciplinary fields and expand my curiosity and creativity.
Over the last year, I have been exploring biomaterials and sustainable textiles. This journey inspired me to take a synthetic biology workshop, where I learned how to grow bacteria with chromoproteins for paint pigment and to explore bio-based materials, such as textiles derived from algae and orange peels. I am continuously fascinated by the intersection of old techniques and new technology and am excited to see how the field of biomaterials and biotechnology will evolve.
Personal Statement
My personal statement combines the traditional craft of quilting with modern QR code technology. By scanning the quilt with your phone, you are transported to a Google Map of love stories gathered from people around the world (tinyurl.com/lovequilt). I hope this brings the rich history of storytelling through quilts to a broader audience—and maybe spreads some love along the way.
The night of Personal Statements could not have gone any better--it was exactly how I envisioned it. I loved watching people’s reactions when I revealed that the QR code worked and their excitement at the hidden map of love stories. I also left space for attendees to write their own love stories to add to the map, and I enjoyed walking by and seeing if anyone was writing their own story. Please feel free to add your story here.
Design, if anything, is about imagining a better future for the world. In a time that can feel so full of hatred and bigotry, I wanted to create something that spreads love and hope for the future. Design, to me, is also about stories. It’s about many, many stories that reveal something new about ourselves and our world. It’s about taking something ordinary and viewing it differently. It can also be about scale, powers of 10, and seeing patterns in the everyday. In many ways, design itself and my experience in the program over the last year were my inspiration. I was playing with the idea of scale and thought that if I scale down a quilt, it becomes a pattern of pixels, and if I scale up a QR code, it becomes a series of patches.
Inspiration
I was inspired by quilting because, like design, quilts are layered with meaning. Quilts have long been used to tell stories, sometimes outright, but many times hidden. From quilts that shared the path of the Underground Railroad during the American Civil War to the Aids Memorial Quilt, the largest community project in the world to honor the lives of those lost to HIV/AIDS, there is a rich history of quilts that tell stories of love and hope. Not just art, quilts also help keep us warm, are gifts passed down by generations, and are labors of love. They are also forms of protest, symbols of resilience, and a traditionally feminine craft used to support and care for the world. For this reason, I knew a QR code in the form of a quilt would have to lead to somewhere full of stories and love - so why not love stories?
Process
Personal Statements is a fast project, so my time for prototyping was limited. I started with a picture of a QR code on my iPad and tested different color squares. Before this project, I didn’t even know you could make a QR code out of different colors, never mind fabric. I also tested the tolerance of the “pixels” of the QR code by scribbling on it and making slight alterations to it. I wanted to understand how precise my quilt needed to be in order to work. That being said, I didn’t really know if it would work until it was finished. There was a moment when I had the quilt top almost sewn together, and I tried orienting it to test if the quilt could scan. It didn’t work, and I thought my whole project was a bust. I continued ahead and thought about other ways I could make the quilt work. Then, when it was all sewn together, I went to take a progress picture, and it accidentally scanned! I was over the moon!
As for gathering stories, I reached out to so many people and had friends share within their own circles. I collected stories via a Google form and manually added them to the map to correspond to the different kinds of love people experience. I wanted Love Quilt to highlight that different kinds of love are just as meaningful as romantic love. Gathering the stories also sparked some interesting conversations with friends about how we, as a society, talk about and share love.
Impact
The freedom and flexibility of Personal Statements encouraged me to self-reflect and make something I was passionate about. During orientation week, each member of my cohort was tasked with creating something that embodied a personal value important to us. My word then, and would still be, authenticity. To me, Personal Statements are so special because they represent an opportunity to highlight every person’s individuality in a way that is authentic to them.
Love Quilt is the project I am most proud of so far from my time at the d.school. From a technical standpoint, I truly did not think I could finish a quilt in two weeks, especially since it was my first quilt. On a more personal note, the project felt like my own love letter to a design journey, and it was heartwarming to share it with so many people.
This opportunity to make something so genuinely me is such a gift, and I don’t take it for granted. As I complete my final quarter at Stanford and move forward, the Personal Statements project has defined a new standard of personal fulfillment that I'll strive to meet in my future endeavors.
Gratitude
A central theme of my personal statement is gratitude–not just to the relationships that fill us with love now, but ones of the past, no matter how brief, that made an impact on us. With that in mind, I cannot thank everyone who contributed a love story enough! This project would not have been possible without your trust and vulnerability. I was intimidated by the task of making a quilt in two weeks, but every time I doubted the QR code would scan or was sick of sewing, I read through and added the love stories that people had contributed to the map. Their stories made me laugh, made me cry, made me reach out to old friends, and kept me motivated to continue and finish the project. I am so grateful for each and every one of you! And, of course, a huge thank you to my fellow "Loftees" and to the d.school graduate academic advising team for continuing to push me to be my most creative and authentic self!
If you'd like to connect, please find me on LinkedIn.
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