What Is A Hand? Faysal Biobaku’s Five Lessons for ID’s Class of 2026

Video Transcript

Thank you all for being here today.

Hello. For those who don’t know me, my name is Faysal Biobaku and I would like to begin by thanking the faculty for the honor of addressing the graduating class today.

This journey has been full of ups and downs. It’s been full of moments where I’ve genuinely wondered, what was I doing here?

None of it, and I mean none of it, would have been possible without the people who held us up. Our families, our partners, our friends, the faculty, and the staff who poured into us. Let’s take a moment to give them a round of applause and appreciate them.

So I would like to start my address today by using a metaphor. I would like to use the hand. It’s five fingers. Five things I’ve learned here and five things I’m leaving with.

First the thumb for hubris. Then we have the index finger for curiosity, the middle finger for confidence, the ring finger for trust, and the little finger for ease.

I’ll walk through each one. I’ll use my own story, and by the end, I hope you see yours in it, too.

First, the thumb. Hubris.

There’s a reason I chose the thumb for this one. Opposable thumbs are what we tell ourselves makes us distinct, superior, above the rest. I came here into this program the same way with over five years of experience in the creative design field. I questioned why I was in the foundation track. Surely I was past that. I argued with Marty.

I had met with the CEOs of fintech companies. I had defined user journeys. I had crafted experiences that moved money around the world. I thought I knew what design brought to the table. I thought I knew what it could be, what I could do. I complained to my parents, but they were very adamant and they said, “Keep an open mind. There is no knowledge lost.” And then one clear fall afternoon in a visual communication class with Professor Tomoko, we were moving through the different levels of abstraction trying to display or communicate what an object or something might be from the concrete to the abstract, from literal to conceptual.

When a colleague turned to the room and quite simply asked, “What is a hand?”

Until that moment, we all assumed we knew. I wondered if I was asking the right questions.

That question cracked something open in me. It led to spirited discussions and challenges like the studio with Professor Zach Pino. We discussed how to create inclusive experiences for people in arguments in this very hallway about where design was going and our responsibility inside of it.

But I could only start asking these questions once I took ego out of the driving seat. The thumb makes us feel like we’re on top. But it’s when we put it down, when we start to ask questions about the history behind our everyday experiences and how we’ve come to exist—we can actually reach for something new.

Collaboration creates giant leaps. Ego slows them down.

Next, the index finger for curiosity.

We point with our index finger when we enter a room we’ve never been in. We reach out with this first. We lead with it. That’s what happened when I let go of hubris.

Curiosity moved to the front. I started asking questions I’ve never asked before about systems and how they interact, about people inside those systems and their behaviors as well. Questions about what we assume and what we miss because of it.

We learned to identify patterns, to map out and visualize complexity, to hold a point of view loosely because the next question might change it.

To the family in the room wondering quietly, did we just spend all this money to learn how to ask questions? I answer you, yes.

I’m just kidding. But there’s more.

Actually, when you lead with curiosity, failure becomes obsolete. And that’s the last time I’ll use the word failure in this speech. There’s only discovery.

Each phase tells you something new. Each dead end is pointing somewhere new.

Questions are not weaknesses. In design—in human-centered design especially—the question is the work.

And here’s what I like to say plainly because we can’t talk about questions in 2026 without talking about this: AI can give you answers—extraordinary answers, fast answers, polished answers.

But it can’t ask the question that matters. Not one born sitting across from strangers, watching their face change when they touch a prototype for the first time. Not one that comes from a visually impaired woman who walks into your apartment by accident and changes how you see your whole project or a whole human experience.

Those questions come from being human, from being present, from being curious about the body in the room, about other people. That is irreplaceable and that’s what we are trained here to do. And now the middle finger for confidence.

With the middle finger, I would like to introduce confidence because this one deserves some emphasis.

In the fall of 2024, I joined a workshop with Professor Marty Thaler exploring haptic technology, the science of touch. The science of feeling what robots feel is a path that I explored in this project. I started asking questions.

What does it mean to interact with an object? How do we actually engage with objects through touch? What would it feel like to let a human hand feel what a robot feels like in real time? And why do we need to do this?

Those questions led to the F1 Hand Controller, a haptic controller that lets operators feel exactly what a robot touches, texture, resistance, and pressure.

We started at Northwestern Hand Labs, working with engineers, watching them work, listening to what wasn’t working. We conducted research into current systems of remote control from gaming to surgery. We built Franken-prototypes from cardboard and encouraged people to critique them.

This product challenges the one-size-fits-all glove model, allowing us to hone in on a direction that considers our differences. We iterated, we refined, and we learned.

This project was recognized by Core77 and Fast Company. It’s a robot controller built from human questions about the human hand.

And here’s the thing, you can’t vibe code your way through that.

The process of deep exploration. Sitting in a lab watching people struggle. Asking questions from behaviors and workarounds observed in the moment. The building, the breaking, the testing and rebuilding. The asking what if about something nobody has ever asked yet. This is that human process. This is your process.

We all have different journeys, similar skills, maybe similar training. Yes. But nobody—nobody—else has your lived experience. Nobody else has been in rooms that you have in your conversations, moments of quiet connection with a stranger over a prototype that almost works.

Nobody can be Faysal Biobaku better than I can. And nobody can be you better than you can. My dad always says to me, “I wish you good times, but tough times ahead.” Not because he wanted to see me struggle, but because he knew through discomfort comes growth. Lead with confidence. Know why you started. And trust the struggle is part of the process.

The ring finger. The ring finger carries a promise. I want to talk about trust.

Professor Marty Thaler gave us a book at the end of our foundation semester. It was Dieter Rams’s The Power of Good Design.

In it, one of the principles stayed with me above all. Good design is honest.

Honesty in design means this.

You cannot build trustworthy solutions if you don’t have the power to recognize your own bias.

The data you choose, the communities you choose to represent, the narratives you choose to build around your findings, it all carries a point of view. It’s all a choice. As designers, we are custodians for these choices.

We have the power to include. We have the power to exclude. Without often meaning to, trust requires us to be transparent even when your hypothesis is proven wrong. Especially then, to interpret clearly, to avoid ambiguity, to say, “Here’s what I found. Here’s what I don’t know and here’s where we should look harder.”

That’s what it means to design with integrity. And lastly, the little finger: ease.

Finally, you can ease up a little bit. Yeah, the rambling is almost over. Am I right?

The little finger. Not the least important, but sometimes the most overlooked. Ease. The little finger provides stability. In reality, it adds grip. It ties it all together.

As designers, everything we make carries a decision. Who gets in? Who gets left outside?

Ease is not decoration. It’s not a nice-to-have. Ease is access. Ease is equity. The hand matters here because design is at its core the act of imagining a future that does not exist.

We reach out into what isn’t there and try and make it real. And the question you must always ask is who can reach it with us?

And finally, the whole hand. I let go of hubris. I led with curiosity. I moved with confidence. I designed with trust. And I built for ease. These are all not easy things to grasp.

But in this room, it’s full of people who did exactly that.

Two and a half years or more, or maybe less, you have asked questions no one had the answers to yet. You built things that did not exist. You stumbled. You turned uncharted territories into new directions. You showed up for each other.

You’re now ready for your next challenge. Your experience is shaping the next phase of your journey. I came here just like AI thinking I had all the answers.

But discovery happens every day through that lived experience. You should be extremely proud. It’s been an honor sharing this space, this time, and this moment with you all. Thank you. I’ve been Faysal Biobaku.

Congratulations to you all.