Esther Choi Is Building a Global Community to Nurture the Next Generation of Designers

When we imagine mentorship in the design fields, we might think of networking in a conference room where people in button-down shirts nervously thumb at their CVs and portfolios, hoping for the right eyes to notice and guide them. Or maybe we think of the slow churn of a young professional apprenticing for a more established one, waiting for the senior to fall so the junior can rise. Esther Choi has a different vision. 

Choi, an artist with a PhD in the history and theory of architecture from Princeton and a practice that straddles design, photography, and the culinary arts, is creating a new mentorship model that ties together minds around the world. Since the summer of 2020, she has been organizing sessions connecting young BIPOC students and practitioners in informal online conversations with more established design professionals of color. 

She calls the events Office Hours, with each session starting off with a different speaker. Choi sees the conversations as akin to an open-ended, socially engaged art project that may raise more questions than it answers. In these Zoom rooms, all topics are on the table, from money to identity to professional licensure. Together, new designers create a form of solidarity with leading professionals by asking the question, "What challenges have you had to overcome, and how will we overcome ours?"

This year, the program features creative professionals like Tammy Eagle Bull, the first Native American woman to gain an architecture license in the United States, and Sumayya Vally, the youngest designer of London’s prestigious annual Serpentine Pavilion. (Vally was profiled in Dwell’s July/August issue.) We spoke with Choi about her experience facilitating the program and what she hears from young designers. 

Dwell: How did you come up with Office Hours? 

Choi: It began in July of 2020 as a practical response to all the questions people were asking me about applying to PhD programs. Basically, I couldn’t have 22 separate hour-long conversations, so Office Hours seemed like a practical solution to group people together. Most of the folks who had inquired were people of color younger than myself. I think for those who are first-generation college graduates, it’s difficult sometimes to understand how to navigate academic channels. I certainly identify with that because I’m the first in my family to get a college education. I advertised the first Office Hours sessions online—and, shockingly, people from more than five countries attended them.