Harmony Simpson
Harmony at Snapchat
At the IxD Design Showcase
Harmony & fellow members of the Design Club
A young Harmony
Food for Thought eating area in the SMC Main Library
Food for Thought area
Harmony in the classroom
With her artwork
Making music
Harmony Simpson was folding leggings at Fabletics in the Westfield Fashion Square in Sherman Oaks when Destiny walked in.
Not a Greek deity—but Destiny Johnson, a counselor from SMC's Black Collegians Program Umoja Community. She recognized her former advisee instantly, and made a beeline toward Harmony’s display table.
“What are you doing? What’s the plan?” Destiny had asked.
“I’m just trying to sell you leggings,” Harmony had deflected. But in her head, she was thinking: “Please don’t make me think about this right now.”
Harmony was supposed to be deciding on a major and plotting her return to school after a year’s hiatus at the peak of Covid.
That chance encounter—“a universal intervention,” she calls it in hindsight—sent Harmony back to college and now, six years later, to the final stretch in SMC’s four-year Interaction Design (IxD) baccalaureate program.
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The name Harmony conjures associations with sweet music, placid waters, blue skies. But for this 24-year-old SoCal native who graduates in June with a B.S. in Interaction Design, the skies haven’t always been serene.
When she was born, her mother had to stay in the hospital due to complications. That left her father, a mechanic with an HVAC business, to care for their newborn infant alone. Harmony was their fourth child. Three years later, her mother, a special ed teacher, was back in the hospital with a brain tumor. She spent months in recovery before returning to work with lasting neurological issues.
When Harmony was 6, her parents lost their home in the 2008 mortgage crisis. At 10, they divorced. Mom moved the kids repeatedly—from Panorama City to Santa Clarita, then Victorville, and back to Santa Clarita. Financial insecurity was a constant.
What carried Harmony through the turbulence was innate self-confidence, restless intellectual curiosity and a succession of super-teachers.
In Victorville, their neighbor Rhonda Dennis, who also happened to be Harmony’s fifth-grade teacher, pushed for her to enroll at Pathways to College, a K-8 charter school in Hesperia that boasts a 12:1 student-teacher ratio.
Harmony thrived there. “It was such an intimate setting. Things were really curated for me,” she recalls.
Through another neighbor, Harmony learned about Buddhist practice, which taught her valuable lessons in intentionality. At 84, Martha Moore remains one of Harmony’s best friends.
A “maker” from early childhood, Harmony would draw on anything she could find and spend hours experimenting with the digital tools in Microsoft Paint. By 8, she was fashioning outfits for her Bratz doll out of tissue paper and cornstarch. She made paper dolls for her friends. Built digital houses for her Sims. Wrote poetry and short stories. Sang in the church choir and took every art class that crossed her path. She got good grades at Canyon High School in Santa Clarita, balancing an eclectic mix of women’s chamber choir, fashion club, AP chemistry and honors anatomy while voraciously reading African American history and literature on the side. Wary of student debt and torn between her passion for studio art and botanical sciences, she declined admission at Cal Poly Humboldt and enrolled at SMC instead.
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Harmony started in fall 2019, commuting from her aunt’s house in Carson. But when the campus switched to remote learning, she stepped away. A year passed.
Then came the Sherman Oaks encounter with Destiny, who urged her to re-enroll.
“I’m fine,” Harmony had pushed back.
“OK, but do you want to be here in five years?” Destiny had persisted.
That got the wheels turning in Harmony’s head. No, she didn’t want to spend her life in retail sales.
“I had fallen into the trap,” she recalls. “I wasn’t 100 percent focused on shaping my career, but on making quick money.”
Harmony reconnected with SMC. She started taking courses in graphic design, oilpainting and glassblowing. Career Services counselor Melinea Abramyan encouraged her to apply to the Snap Design Academy, a competitive five-month design internship. Harmony had no digital portfolio—just paintings on canvas. So she quickly taught herself to use Adobe Illustrator and produced a mock album cover (“I was into songwriting at the time,” she says.) To her surprise, Harmony was one of 15 Snap fellows selected from a pool of 500 candidates. The internship saw her co-developing “ProudARt,” an immersive AR lens utilizing 3D storytelling and audio layers to spotlight marginalized artists.
When the fellowship ended, Harmony got called back for a paid internship with Snap Inc., where she helped redesign the company’s SnapGraphy/PlayCanvas moderation tools.
Another internship saw her creating signage and working on an annual report for the educational nonprofit 826LA.
A campus internship with SMC’s Sustainability Center has grown into a lasting relationship as one of the department’s go-to freelance graphic artists. It led to Harmony’s launch of her own design business, Hours of Harmony.
In 2024, Harmony graduated with three associate degrees in graphic design, social sciences and general sciences. She was accepted into the IxD program and landed a summer internship at BMW Designworks, where her team envisioned solar-powered trams and biophilic canopy structures for a reimagined Sepulveda Basin mobility hub.
Though the IxD curriculum is very demanding, Harmony took on extra coursework in cell culture techniques and lab methodology. She envisions a career at the intersection of creative technology, biology and design anthropology. In the long-term, she aspires to work in industry and academia.
She’ll leave SMC with an impressive resume. Her student proposal for a food-friendly lounge in the SMC Library redesign project actually got built. Last year, she art directed Prism Flow, the Center for Media and Design’s year-end student showcase. In December, she was the only student panelist on an EdSource roundtable exploring innovation in college access, where she shared the spotlight with American Council on Education president Ted Mitchell, and five other higher-ed policy leaders.
“SMC is probably tired of me by now,” she laughs, referring to all the doors the college has opened for her.
Among the long list of super-teachers and super-counselors who inspired Harmony are Wilfred Doucet, Maxim Safioulline, Bonita Tanaka, Jocelyn Winn, Luke Johnson, Nicole Chan, Melinea Abramyan and the Black Collegians faculty. And of course, Destiny Johnson.
“I’m incredibly grateful for all the mentors I found at SMC,” she says.
Next up, Harmony plans to a get a year’s worth of professional interaction design work experience before applying to graduate schools. She envisions becoming an educator, researcher, and design-engineer. She's drawn to the ethical questions that technical fields aren't always positioned to ask. Wherever life leads, Harmony has no doubt she’ll flourish.
It feels like destiny.
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SMC in Focus Volume XII, Issue 2
It Was Destiny
A chance encounter in a Sherman Oaks mall put graduating Interaction Design student Harmony Simpson back on track. Read Article
In her Shoes
The daughter of Cuban immigrants—and a first-gen high school & college graduate—SMC’s new(ish) VP of Student Success on resilience, her life’s turning points, and what keeps her centered. Read Article
Fashioning Futures
Rails founder Jeff Abrams brings scholarship support and industry insights to SMC students as they pattern careers in fashion. Read Article
Frieze Frame
SMC showed up in force at Frieze Los Angeles, where 22 student interns engaged with top galleries and collectors, established artists (including four SMC alum) and 32,000 visitors at this world-class art fair. Read Article
Bragging Rights
Applied classical voice students win top awards. IxD grads receive offers from the best schools. An aquaculture instructor dives deep into kelp conservation. Read Article
Lighting the Way
Santa Monica College widened the lens for Charles Butler, helping him go from modeling and background acting to success behind the scenes of hit reality shows. Read Article