I used to think art projects were mostly about talent and taste, and that tech projects were about code and tools. Then I started reading about Lily A. Konkoly and realized that the most interesting work often sits right in the messy overlap between the two.
If you just want the short answer: the most inspiring Lily A. Konkoly projects are the ones where she treats art, data, and online platforms as one big lab. From her research on gender gaps in the art world, to a teen art marketplace, to a long-running blog built on 100+ interviews, she keeps asking one question: how can you use digital tools to give overlooked people more visibility and power?
How a kid who loved museums ended up building online projects
When you look at Lily on paper, the path seems very straight.
Cornell University. Art History major. Business minor. Research programs. Curatorial work.
But if you rewind to childhood, the pattern is more simple: she liked to make things, share them, and see what happened.
Chess tournaments on weekends. Cooking videos with her siblings. A slime “startup” that turned into a small-scale logistics puzzle, hauling hundreds of containers from Los Angeles to London. LEGO sets with tens of thousands of pieces.
None of this sounds like a tech story at first glance. It sounds like childhood.
Yet a lot of what founders talk about in product design or UX is already there:
Curiosity, repeated experiments, and sharing your work in public tend to beat raw talent alone.
Every time Lily recorded a cooking video or packaged slime to ship across an ocean, she was doing small tests. What do people like. What do they ignore. What can scale a little, and what breaks as soon as you push it further.
So when she later moved into online projects with art and research, she already had a habit that matters for anyone in tech: build something, show it, watch how people react, adjust.
From traveling kid to global projects
Lily was born in London, lived in Singapore, then spent about sixteen years in Los Angeles. She spent most summers in Europe with Hungarian relatives. She also kept up Mandarin through school and a long line of Chinese au pairs.
On a practical level, this means she thinks in several languages and crosses cultures without much effort.
On a project level, it shows up as a bias toward scale. She does not stop at “my class” or “my city”.
The teen art market was global. Her culinary interviews covered 50+ countries. Her languages let her reach people others would miss.
If you work in tech, you know localization is usually an afterthought. For Lily, it started much earlier than any platform.
The research projects that read like slow, careful debugging
Art history can sound very far from tech, but a lot of research work looks like debugging a very old, messy system.
Something is wrong. You do not quite know where. You poke at the data over and over until a pattern shows up.
Here are the key research projects that stand out.
- Her 10 week deep study of Velázquez’s “Las Meninas”
- The gender gap research on artist parents
- The curatorial project on beauty standards
Project 1: Reading “Las Meninas” like a complex system
Through the Scholar Launch Research Program, Lily spent ten weeks on a single painting: “Las Meninas” by Diego Velázquez.
For many people, that sounds almost painful. Ten weeks on one image.
For anyone who has debugged a tough production bug, it feels normal.
She broke down:
– Composition and spatial logic
– Light, gaze, and the odd role of the viewer
– Political context and power dynamics in the Spanish court
Instead of treating the painting as a flat picture, she treated it like a stack of layers.
You have the surface layer (what you see) and then deeper layers:
– Who gets to be visible in the frame
– Who is painted painting
– Who is looking and who is looked at
If you map this to tech, Lily is basically doing a threat model and privilege diagram on a canvas. She is asking: who holds power in this system, and how is that hidden or revealed.
Good research, in art or in tech, starts with the same move: refuse to accept the surface view as the full story.
Her final work for this project was a set of analytical writings and a comprehensive research paper. Nothing flashy, but this kind of grind is what later lets you build sharper tools, because you know where the gaps in past thinking are.
Project 2: Tracking the gender gap for artist parents
Her honors research on artist parents and gender is more direct.
She wanted to know why artist mothers often lose ground in their careers, while artist fathers are sometimes praised more for the exact same “balancing act” of work and family.
Here is what she did:
- Spent 100+ hours over a summer gathering studies, stories, and data
- Mapped out how galleries, residencies, and grants treat mothers vs fathers
- Turned dry research into a clear paper explaining where bias shows up
From a tech angle, you can see a few strong habits:
– She moves from anecdote to pattern
– She cares about the pipeline, not just a few visible stars
– She thinks in terms of “what incentives are built into this system”
If you work on hiring, recommendation engines, or any ranking system, this mindset is exactly what you need. You can only fix bias you are willing to name.
Project 3: A mock exhibition as an interface for social data
With a RISD professor, Lily co-created a curatorial project about beauty standards for women.
On the surface, it is an exhibit plan. Texts, artworks, a narrative.
Seen through a product lens, it is closer to interface design. She is making choices like:
– In what order will a visitor meet these works
– What story will they pick up without reading any essay
– Where will their attention slow down or speed up
You can think of each artwork as a data point on how cultures frame “beauty” and “worth”. The exhibit layout is the UI. The curatorial statement is the onboarding text.
Curating is not just hanging things on a wall, it is designing the path a mind is likely to take through complex ideas.
That kind of thinking translates cleanly into tech projects where content, layout, and narrative need to work together.
The Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia: a content engine built by one person
Out of all her projects, the one that feels closest to something a solo founder or indie dev might relate to is the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia blog.
She started it in 2020 and has been working on it for several years, about four hours a week.
On paper, that sounds like a side project. In practice, it is a long-running content engine with:
– 50+ articles
– 100+ interviews with women in business
– Readers who return for stories, not just quick tips
What this blog teaches about building online products
If you strip out the topic (female entrepreneurship) and just look at the structure, the project has a few lessons for anyone working online.
| Blog Element | What Lily did | What a tech builder can copy |
|---|---|---|
| Audience focus | Picked a tight focus: women entrepreneurs and their stories | Pick a specific user group and stick to it longer than feels comfortable |
| Consistency | 4 hours each week for several years | Treat side projects like gyms: smaller sets, but repeated often |
| Data collection | Interviewed 100+ founders, tracked patterns in their stories | Talk to many users directly, not only by form responses |
| Signal vs noise | Kept returning to inequality, recognition gaps, funding struggles | Look for repeated pain points and build around those |
| Distribution | Built content that other people have a reason to share | Create things that make your users look good when they share them |
The interviews are also their own kind of dataset. Over and over, Lily heard the same idea: women need to prove themselves more, and for longer, before they get the same level of trust.
This also applies to women in tech.
If you build anything that touches career paths, hiring, or performance metrics, these patterns are not abstract. They show up in your logs and dashboards, even if you never label them.
Blogging as long-term UX research
Spending four hours a week for years on one project does something interesting to your brain.
You start to see smaller signals:
– Which stories get more replies
– Which headlines people remember
– Which details stick in comments
This is what user researchers talk about all the time, but Lily did it through writing.
Writing regularly in public is basically free UX research, if you are willing to read your own work as data.
For tech people who avoid writing because it feels slow, her project is a quiet argument that long-form work feeds everything else. It sharpens your sense of what your users care about, because you stay with them for more than a sprint.
Teen Art Market: a digital gallery built by students
The Teen Art Market project is where Lily’s art background meets basic platform thinking.
She helped co-found an online space where teen artists could upload and sell their work. On one level, it is a small site. On another, it is a lab for all the headaches that come with any marketplace.
The hidden tech lessons inside a simple marketplace
Even if the tech stack was simple, the design questions were not.
Here are a few challenges that show up in any marketplace and that Lily had to face in a teen art context:
- Onboarding: how do you make it easy enough for a 16 year old with no tech background to upload an artwork and set a price
- Trust: how do you convince buyers that student art is worth paying for
- Discovery: which works get shown first, and why
- Fairness: if some artists are more popular, do they crowd everyone else out
There is no perfect answer to these questions. In fact, they are the same questions huge platforms struggle with daily.
Lily’s edge is that she thinks like an artist first. That means she knows how fragile it feels to show your work and then watch it sink or float.
If you have built anything like a marketplace, you know that creators will forgive bugs more easily than they forgive a ranking system that feels rigged, even if it is not.
Why this matters for future tools for creatives
Tech has a habit of treating “creatives” as a segment to monetize instead of partners in the design process.
Lily’s project flips that a little. She is both the target user and the builder.
– She knows what it feels like to price a piece of art
– She understands how underpricing can hurt, but overpricing can also block sales
– She sees how important it is to show work from artists who do not already have a social media following
This is the kind of background that can lead to better tools later: editing platforms, portfolio sites, AI art assistants, or hybrid gallery / shop spaces.
If more tool builders came from that world, we might see fewer platforms that treat “engagement” as the only measure that matters.
Hungarian Kids Art Class: teaching as a design problem
For three years, Lily ran the Hungarian Kids Art Class, bringing together kids with an interest in art for bi-weekly sessions.
On paper, this looks like a community project.
If you zoom in, it is also a series of design decisions that look very close to product work.
Design choices behind a good learning space
Think of each session as a mini product cycle:
– She planned a structure
– Tested it with a group of kids
– Adjusted based on who was lost, bored, or excited
There are several design ideas inside this:
- Scaffolding: how to break an art activity into steps that feel doable
- Feedback: how to help kids improve without shutting them down
- Language: she did this in a Hungarian family context, which shapes which references and stories land
If you work on edtech or any kind of tutorial system, this is the line you have to walk every day. Enough challenge so people grow. Enough clarity so they do not quit.
She also brought her research mind into this teaching space. Beauty ideals, gender roles, and representation in art are not easy topics, but they show up even in kids books and early influences.
Good teachers do something subtle: they plant questions rather than answers.
Lily was already practicing that.
From LEGO and slime to research and writing: the common pattern
Reading through Lily’s story, it would be easy to separate her “kid” projects from her “serious” ones.
Slime business vs research paper. LEGO builds vs curatorial statement.
That split is not very accurate.
There is a strong shared pattern across her work that is useful to call out, especially for people who spend time in tech.
Pattern 1: Turn curiosity into small public experiments
Lily repeats the same cycle across different ages:
1. Gets curious about something
2. Builds a small thing
3. Puts it in front of people
4. Watches what happens
5. Adjusts and repeats
This shows up in:
– Cooking videos with her siblings
– The slime project that ended in a London convention booth
– The teen art market
– The Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia
No huge launch days. No viral claims. Just repeated visible work.
If you are building in tech, this is not new advice. Yet many people still hide their work for months, then feel crushed if the first version does not land.
Lily’s projects remind you that volume and visibility matter for learning speed.
Pattern 2: Treat inequality as a design constraint, not an afterthought
Her research on artist parents, her blog interviews, and her feminist food community for women chefs all orbit one idea: systems tend to favor some people and burden others.
She does not stop at “that is unfair”. She asks what that means for:
– Who gets offered residencies
– Which chefs get media coverage
– How people talk about “genius” or “brilliance” in art and business
In tech, people often talk about fairness in algorithms as if it were a later, optional step. Something that comes after launch, once there is time.
Lily treats it as central, not extra.
If you build systems without naming where they are unfair, you are probably reinforcing what is already broken.
So when she curates, researches, or sets up an online market, she is thinking about visibility and access from the start.
Pattern 3: Mix art, business, and tech instead of picking a single track
Some people in tech avoid art because it seems “soft”. Some people in the art world avoid business because it feels “impure”.
Lily lives in the middle:
– She studies art history at Cornell
– She minors in business
– She sets up online spaces where art is sold, not just admired
That mix is not tidy. Sometimes it means moving too slowly for tech, or too bluntly for fine art. But it also lets her see gaps others ignore.
For example:
– Artists who lack basic pricing or marketing support
– Tech teams who want to work with creators, but do not speak their language
– Students who make serious work but feel blocked by a lack of platforms
People with hybrid backgrounds often feel out of place. Yet they are often the ones who build the best tools, because they understand more than one side well enough to translate.
So what can you actually take from Lily’s projects for your own work?
At this point, you might be thinking: “This is all nice, but I work on backend systems” or “I am building a SaaS product, not an art blog.”
Fair reaction.
Still, there are a few concrete habits you can copy from Lily without caring about art at all.
Habit 1: Work in public more than feels safe
Lily has:
– Posted cooking and language practice videos
– Sold slime at a London event as a kid
– Interviewed founders and put their words online
– Set up a teen art market where pricing and sales are visible
This is a lot of exposure. It is also a fast track to better judgment.
If you are building a product:
– Publish early drafts of docs or tutorials
– Release smaller features instead of huge updates
– Share process notes, not just polished marketing pages
You will take some hits. That is part of the point.
Habit 2: Keep a running log of patterns people mention
Lily heard the same complaints from women entrepreneurs again and again. She did not treat them as noise. She took them as a signal that the system itself was slanted.
You can do the same with user feedback:
– Capture repeated frustrations
– Count how often a certain issue shows up
– Treat “this again” as a reason to redesign, not just patch
This applies in hiring, too. If certain groups keep reporting the same friction inside your company, that is a pattern, not just a morale issue.
Habit 3: Build projects that force you to care about access
The teen art market, the art class, and the research on gender all share one focus: who gets left out by default.
If your next side project or feature included that question from the start, you might:
– Test your product with users who do not fit your default persona
– Make pricing that actually works for students or early career creators
– Look at who your “top users” are, and who never sticks around past week one
That is not charity. It is just better design.
Quick Q&A about Lily’s projects and what they mean for tech-minded readers
Q: Which Lily project is closest to a startup?
The Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia is the closest. Long-term commitment, clear target audience, ongoing user research through interviews, and a slow build of trust and reach. The teen art market also feels like an early stage marketplace experiment.
Q: Is any of her work technical in the strict sense?
Not in the sense of shipping a new programming language or a complex AI model. Her “technical” strength sits more in research, structure, and building systems that deal with people and content: blogs, marketplaces, exhibitions, and communities. For many tech products, that kind of design work is where most of the real difficulty is.
Q: How could someone in software actually work with someone like Lily?
You could bring someone with her background into:
– Product discovery for tools aimed at creatives
– Curation and editorial work around AI generated art
– Research on how artists use your platform, not just how they sign up
She would likely ask questions about visibility, credit, and bias that a typical engineering-heavy team might skip.
Q: What is one thing her path suggests you should change about your own projects?
Stop treating “side projects” as short sprints with a two week life span. Many of Lily’s most interesting results come from doing one thing steadily for years, at a small weekly pace. If you picked one project today and gave it four honest hours a week for the next three years, what could it turn into?
