Bobby Xiao

Engineering is not about proving what I can build. It is about understanding who I am building for, and whether it truly works in their reality.

I began valuing secondary research as a way to better understand the stakeholders. Interviews alone are not enough to steelman a framing claim.

I extended my value of stakeholder reality to physical reality itself. A model that is not validated against what it claims to represent is speculative, regardless of how rigorous the mathematics are. I now approach every design with the question: what are we assuming, and when will we test it?

My core values remain the same: understand our own limitations, understand stakeholders through scientific methods, and validate a design through testing. Praxis II gave me the chance to apply these more thoroughly across a full design cycle.