Chicago said dream bigger. Elkhart said now prove it.
I noticed things early. That’s just how I was wired.
Walking to school past a park that in the fall looked like what you would see in a kaleidoscope. Warm amber, deep orange, yellows and reds that wrap you up in awe. A warm Super Donut and cold milk waiting at school. I was already paying attention to how things made me feel before I had language for why.
At night on the expressway, the red Magikist lips on the I-290 glowed against the Westside sky. Big, pretty, lit up. It felt like Vegas, fresh and futuristic. Like the possibilities I saw every day. I never even thought to ask my parents what they were for. The feeling was enough.
I didn’t have the word for it then. The word is design.
Elkhart was a different frequency.
The car rides with my mom had a whole soundtrack. R&B, hip hop, Michael Jackson’s Dangerous album, or Naughty by Nature’s Hip Hop Hooray on repeat some days. My aunt Necee kept it on Vix 106, oldies like the Isley Brothers, the kind of music that made me feel like I had already lived through it. Rides with my Grandma took me back even further: Aretha and Al Green. Three different women, three different frequencies, and each one was saying something about the world even when the conversation was about something else entirely. That balance shaped how I listen now. How I pay attention to what’s being said and what isn’t.
I changed schools almost every other year. New building, new kids, new unwritten rules to decode fast. I got good at reading a room before I sat down in it. Who led. Who followed. Who made people feel good, and who didn’t. Nobody called it UX research. But that’s exactly what it was.
On South Main Street there was a mural I acknowledged every time we passed it. Big. A figure demanding the world put its guns down. My mom told me who painted it a few times. Kelby Love. She went to school with him. I held onto the name, because it meant love for beautifying our neighborhood. Years later my Advertising Design teacher introduced us and I totally geeked out. I felt like I knew him forever, and he embraced me like he knew me forever as well. Shared love for art, for putting something real where people couldn’t ignore it. His Peace Mural stood for 28 years. The building finally gave out in 2024. You carry what things meant long after the wall comes down.
My dad climbed the Elkhart water tower on a hot summer day in June of 95. In a cut-off shirt and shorts, hat turned to the back. Authentically him. While a full emergency crew stood on the ground watching, he went up and talked a man down from the most permanent kind of decision. Came home running on adrenaline, grabbed up his kids, and we celebrated him. We were proud. We were relieved. That moment rippled through the whole town. A Marine with a heart bigger than his rank, who didn’t think twice about climbing toward someone who needed him. The Cullens name meant something after that. Still does.
The simplest solution is usually the most human one. I’ve been designing around that truth ever since.
The Tolson Center was our after school world. But you had to earn your way to the back. Thirty minutes of homework, reading, or drawing before anything else. I always drew. Then the doors opened and so did everything else. Popcorn and hot pockets in the air, kids from different schools, different ages, people who ran things in the city moving through the same space as the rest of us. Tolson had range. You left knowing more people than when you walked in, and somehow also knowing more about yourself. That was the system. And it worked every single time.
Do the work first. Everything else opens up after. I didn’t realize I was learning that at twelve years old in Elkhart, Indiana. But I was.
Chicago gave me scale. Elkhart gave me depth.
One taught me that systems could be big, fast, and alive all at once. The other taught me that the most important design happens close to the ground, for the people who never make the brochure.
I zoom in and zoom out now without thinking about it. That’s still how I work. 🖤
Whitney Cullens is a product designer who has always read the room. Turns out that’s the job.