Muses of Bella Podcast, Episode 4 - Melati Diran, Student of Life
My guest today is someone who I met through one of my best friends, Daisy Ramli, who has been doing these incredible Indonesian food pop ups in New York City over the last few years, called Sayang. I had the pleasure of joining Daisy on a shoot that she was doing for Sayang where we filmed a group of Indonesian expats living in New York, having lunch at Upi Jaya which is an Indonesian restaurant in Queens. The subject matter was a discussion of what it means to be Indonesian and the experience of having lived in New York as an expat. I have to say I am always so excited when I meet someone from back home over here because it’s a fairly rare thing. And it’s also a rare thing in life that you meet people and have an instant connection with them which is what I had with my guest today, Melati Diran. I find Melati to be someone that is very self reflective and empathetic, it seems to just be engrained as part of her nature and as such a young woman I think she has a very honest way of making sense of the world that is fairly wise. Melati moved to New York from Jakarta at the age of seventeen and although originally a fine artist, she stumbled into design and is now a product designer for Glossier. When I asked Melati about what it was that she loved about design this was the answer she gave me; that it teaches you to be an empathetic person. Most of the time when your designing you are scarcely designing for yourself. You are using creativity to solve problems and share stories and to be able to do that successfully you need to understand the art of being in somebody else shoes. And so I found that this interview was one of the more abstract conversations that I’ve had. Melati was so beautifully vulnerable and open and really gave us insight into her internal world.