<aside> 🌟 Caroline Hermans is a UX engineer at Google and alumnus of CMU. At CMU, she was an ECE + Art major and involved with the Frank-Ratchye Studio for Creative Inquiry, Scotch’n’Soda, and AEPi. When she isn’t working at Google, she is collaborating with her friends at Algorat, teaching printmaking at her local art studio, and making weird art with her friends!

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Could you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

My name is Caroline Hermans and I am a UX engineer at Google—I’m the only engineer on the design team. I work with designers to do design testing, but I’m writing code. Outside of UX, I’m really into physical media and art. I’m really into print-making, and I also teach print-making classes here in Oakland. I love any excuse to do weird art with my friends.

What was your major at CMU and how did you come about what you do now?

At CMU I studied Electrical Computer Engineering and Art. I did essentially the first Engineering and Art BXA to do the additional major. I also took a bunch of design classes, so I was kind of all over the place. And I did a bunch of hackathons and UX— as much interdisciplinary stuff as I could.

🐀 What are some big projects you worked on during college?

The biggest thing is Algorat, a computational rat art collective. There were four of us on the team, and we all found each other in the Frank-Ratchye Studio for Creative Inquiry, which was directed by Professor Golan Levin at the time. It was an open community where we could sit down with each other and be inspired by each other. Algorat was really chaotic at first, but we realized we were all computer science and art majors, so we could probably build something cool. We started building little websites where you could **build your own rat, build your own data-based rat valentine generator**, and things like that. Our big project, which blew up a little bit was the Ratchelor. I haven’t laughed that hard as when we were writing dialogue for the Ratchelor. The collaboration with everyone at Algorat is one of the great joys of my life.

🐀 Were there any fears you had before and while you were entering the workforce regarding your creative passions and interests? How did you end up dealing with those fears?

My biggest fear starting work after CMU was that somehow by taking a job I was permanently committing myself to something, and that my very first job out of college had to be a very fully deeply authentic representation of my entire goals in life as a person. What I’ve actually realized is that careers are very long and they can change. I have been at Google since I graduated, but I’ve been on three teams at Google and that’s a lot of change by itself. If I feel that I’m in a position where there’s something else that I want to try that could be different or expand my mindset, I’ve realized that you can just do that. You can take on a different role in a project, switch teams, or even find a new job, and that was something I didn’t understand when I was graduating. The truth is that there’s a lot of time for movement, and find a team that would really teach me what I needed to learn at any moment. No one is going to force you to stay somewhere and there is a lot of change and growth that happens after you graduate.

🐀 Do you view your professional career and your personal projects as completely separate parts of your practice?

I think they’re kind of separate, but I do think I’m authentically creative at work all the time. The things I do at work are part of me creatively solving problems and bringing them to people, and they’re a more logical and methodical part of my brain. I do bring a lot of that into projects I do outside of work, like in the Ratchelor, where I worked a lot on the UI and the flow of the game. There’s a little circle that gets created–the art informs the design and the design informs the engineering and the engineering informs the art.

🐀 What are your thoughts on ‘if you do what you love, you never work a day in your life’ type of work beliefs?

There is definitely some truth to that—having your voice be what you do is definitely nice. There’s a spectrum of work, from work that fully represents you as a creator to work that maybe represents some other part of yourself. A lot of creators I know have gone in and out of different ends of that spectrum. You might spend a while working at a big company, and then freelancing, and then at a smaller startup, but there’s enough room for all of those things on a long enough timescale. There isn’t a right or wrong answer—just different experiences and more time to explore those.

🐀 Do you think that a your professional career has impacted your creative practice?

Totally. The biggest thing I’ve learned at Google is how to manage projects and scope things. Thinking about what I can realistically build in a certain timeframe and managing that has been a huge part of what I’ve learned at Google and it’s something I was so bad at when I was starting my job. Now, I’ll walk into a room and start making lists and prioritizing those lists, and just be very methodical. That has been so important in my creative pursuits; almost an element of knowing what needs to get done and knowing how to effectively collaborate.

🐀 Was there anything that you learned about your professional practice that came from personal projects?

My creative projects definitely influence what I do at work; recently I’ve been playing a lot around with AI image generation (caveat, I don’t know if it’s real art or not from a philosophical standpoint, but it’s fun to play with). I thought my team would find it really interesting, so I used it to generate some mockups for our product. It’s really fun to bring in more weird, new technologies into a space where that isn’t the exact express point. Keeping a healthy creative practice has definitely informed my professional work, they go hand-in-hand.

🐀 And finally to wrap everything up, do you have any advice for creative people who may be scared of losing the opportunity to be as creative once they begin working?

If you’re a creative person, that doesn’t just go away. You have time in your career to explore what feels right for you. You’ll feel if something isn’t working for you, and you’ll be able to find a way of being that mesh all of these parts of your identity together. Another thing is that if you are taking a job that is really not what your creative practice is, it can be really important to find a way to have that creative outlet. It doesn’t have to be the most spontaneous; for me, what ended up working was going to a local art center and finding a community there. Being creatively fulfilled looks different for different people, but find whatever feels good to you. Creative communities can be a really nice way to keep getting inspired, whether that’s in a local organization near you or meeting people on the internet and inspiring each other. I have a really strong sense of when I’m not creatively fulfilled, and the community has really helped with that.