Interviewing a User-Centered Designer, Eva Nip
Introduction
When tasked with interviewing an individual who practices user-centered design, I immediately thought of my good friend, Eva Nip.
We first met through a Design For America conference last fall, where she gave a talk on the value of historical perspectives when approaching design for social impact. In 2018, Eva graduated from Washington University in St. Louis upon completing a Bachelor’s degree in urban studies/affairs. Since then, she has actively taken on many opportunities to apply her understanding of design rooted in human-centered methodologies.
Recently, Eva has served as a…
- Community Mobilization Intern at UNICEF USA, where she initiated a design thinking project to improve the adult volunteer process.
- City Year Americorps Member at City Year Chicago, where she spent a year creating and facilitating lesson plans on foundational ELA—simultaneously analyzing student educational/emotional data and planning community-building events.
- Program and Education Associate at the Creative Reaction Lab, where she facilitated sessions to educate, train, and challenge minority youth to become leaders through an equity-centered community design process.
- Young Leaders Training Cohort Facilitator at the Chicago Freedom School, where she co-facilitated restorative and healing justice trainings for educators.
- Summer Facilitator at Territory Chicago, a nonprofit dedicated to building youth voice and power through urban design studio programs.
Eva recently accepted a role as a Community Organizer for the Chinese-American community in Chicago, where she will conduct community outreach on political perspectives and develop a reach program for high school students.
The first time I heard Eva speak, I was instantly in awe of her commitment and involvement in designing for social justice. She helped me immensely by offering advice for my own Design For America project centered around gentrification in Cincinnati. All-around, Eva is a humble, genuine person who serves as one of my greatest role models. I have been actively learning more about design for social impact through case studies, articles, and podcasts to broaden my perspective and better inform my practices moving forward.
I thought that Eva would be an ideal candidate to interview because she continuously practices tenets of user-centered design, but in less conventional ways than “traditional” designers would (specializing in communication, fashion, industrial design)—given the context of her work.
Project Description
I asked Eva to describe a recent project in which she practiced user-centered design. She shared one of her experiences as a City Year Americorps Member. Eva was tasked with designing and facilitating a family engagement night for an entire school comprised of a majority Black, low-income student population in Chicago, Illinois.
This was not a formalized design project. It came more from working with the school’s background, and additionally, none of her volunteer teammates knew much about the design process. In fact, there was no history of human-centered design processes being utilized in the school.
With the limited time and resources at her disposal, Eva found herself struggling with overcoming the thought, “Oh, it doesn’t have to be this exact way that I learned how to approach design problems.” Unlike some of her previous projects where she followed a well-defined process, this experience was much more organic and required on-the-spot applications of design thinking rather than facilitated ones.
Eva’s priority for the event was clear: to bring people together. Thus, Eva got teachers, community, and staff involved in the process to help the night run more smoothly. She had to find ways to keep hundreds of students occupied and organized, so she reached out to teachers from different grades to run activities as a means of imbuing co-creation in the design process. She knew that by keeping the different grade levels represented, the students would be better engaged. An example of an activity facilitated was a paint-by-numbers station, where students created portraits of notable Black figures.
Methods & Principles
Eva implemented a lot of the core values of UCD throughout the entirety of this process. She was unable to incorporate many of the tools she has utilized in formal design processes—such as sticky note ideation in a group, for which there was no time to execute given the teachers’ busy schedules.
Instead, she took on a more conversational, interview-based approach to better plan the event. Interviewing teachers, Eva led a participatory process in which she asked teachers about their experiences and invited them to co-develop activities. I consider this method to be a form of direct user research, as Eva asked many questions on what a successful event looks like and facilitated an ideation processes appropriate to the availability of teachers.
After these interviews, Eva would synthesize all of the information through visual mapping, flesh out some of the concepts, and then present them to the teachers for more insight. This all went on during the school day, limiting Eva’s capacity to formally create prototypes, but she successfully conducted testing through her presentation of ideas and communication strategy.
Eva shared that the event’s success came from her efforts to include co-creation in the design process; if she did not recruit the help and insight of the teachers to develop its framework, then it would likely not be as effective in engaging the students and meeting the objective of inspiring community. She understood the importance of this approach from her past experiences, and it has become so deeply ingrained into her everyday practice that it is almost a subconscious consideration.
Target Audience
The whole school, which functions grades kindergarten through 8th grade, was invited to participate in this event. The school Eva volunteered at was relatively small, but regardless, the planning process was comprehensive given the number of stakeholders involved—including students of different age groups, parents, teachers, principals, and local organizations. Eva conducted stakeholder mapping to identify all of the users and better understand their needs.
The Value of User-Centered Design
Eva shared, “I wish there was more room for formal design processes to give more agency to teachers and create stronger outcomes.” The values of HCD—valuing people, co-creation, collaboration, to name a few—were “huge value adds,” and without them, it would have been an entirely different event. For a project heavily grounded in the community, Eva’s openness to change within the process empowered her to pivot when needed and navigate through the context’s complexities. She reiterated how the event could be improved upon if the school could allocate more resources and time towards HCD processes.
My Takeaways
Interviewing Eva was an incredibly insightful experience. I found it genuinely interesting to hear experiences practicing and reframing some of the principles of design I am learning at school/through Design For America.
I learned how critical it is to incorporate all stakeholders in the co-creation process after Eva shared she wished students were given more agency to develop age-appropriate activities.
I also learned from Eva that once you practice human-centered design enough times, it becomes intuitive. Unless you are in a firm or design-oriented company situation, the process will never be formalized and will be a matter of how you can quickly apply your learning to adapt to specific circumstances. I hope to explore and execute this notion as I progress in my design education and pursuits.
Sources & Resources
