Hello!

I'm Zee Doehling, nice to meet you. Living in the Atlanta area for the first 24 years of my life, my wife Isabel and I just recently moved back after spending a few years abroad. In school I was fascinated by study abroad programs but had the desire to not just study but work abroad. Enticed by the desire to work, live, and participate in a community foreign to us, we set off to South Korea to teach English in the small city of Gwangyang-Eup 광양읍, near Korea's southern coast. Please do ask me any questions about my experiences as I love to share about the program and our time there.

Favorite foods: 오리고기 (Duck Bulgogi), KBBQ, and KyoChon (Korean Fried Chicken)
What I miss most: My students

We arrived in Korean in August 2021 to very strict COVID-19 policies, so while we hoped to leverage our time in Asia to visit surrounding countries, that wasn't an option. So, after enjoying an incredible year we decided to set off once again but this time nomadically with the goal of experiencing many different countries and cultures… y con la meta de aprender Español! Aunque tengo un gran cuesta enfrente de mi, estoy orgulloso de lo que aprendí.

We traveled across the globe, spending most of our time in the Americas and Asia, bumping into a few familiar faces in multiple places, and picking up a few new skills along the way.

Fun skills: Conversational Spanish, SCUBA certification, Snowboarding

After being away, it feels good to come back and settle in one place for a while near friends and family, and I'm optimistically looking forward to what my next adventure will be in this chapter of my life.

Why I design

I enjoy solving problems, learning systems, and figuring out why things worked the way they do. I see this play out in all sorts of areas of my life:

• I saw it when I took math courses because I didn't care to simply use a formula when I was supposed to, but rather why the formulas existed to begin with then the proper use would follow suit.
• I see it whenever I play a new board game as I am always looking for different or hidden strategies I can use to best my friends.
• I see it when making difficult decisions that involve many different people's emotions where I need to understand why people act the way they do in order to create the best compromise.
• I see it when I cook dinner as I try and do all my prepping, cooking, and cleaning simultaneously and most efficiently.

No matter what aspect of my life, there are always reasons things are work the way they do, and I try to fight the urge to assume the way something's been done before is the best way to continue. It's understanding someone's intent, the underlying reason, the 'why' that allows me to make informed decisions as insignificant as how I squeeze my tooth paste or as life altering as where to live.

This mentality has been the driving factor behind my studies as a designer. All designers do is solve problems: How do I get this information out? How will a user interact with my application? How can I influence change? My job is to figure out what the problem is and solve it- by design.