11.6 // PhD presentations
In today’s class, we had the pleasure of hearing from the PhD students and their paths through design. The intention of the session was to share the great expanse of what it means to be a professional designer as well as help some of the class think about the potential paths that they are interested in exploring at school.
Below is a high level overview of each of the speaker’s stories.
Sofia Bosch Gomez
Sofia’s story is a global one with a BA in Canada, a Master’s in the UK, relocating back to Mexico City to work and now in a PhD in the USA.
Her focus has been the role of designers in Mexican public service, looking deeply into the intersection of social innovation and interaction design in Mexico City.
One of the most challenging examples of prototyping that she had was for a panic button in a taxi app that was intended to help prevent femicides and keep women safe. Here, the prototype was needed not only test the UI but all the systems that needed to be in place for women to trust that this panic button would function as necessary.
Donna Maione
Donna’s key focus in design has been about fashion. However, after discovering that 85 per cent of textiles go to landfill, Donna wanted to understand how she could play a role in making her craft more sustainable.
This is what Donna described as going from a maker to a remaker, remaking the process of design around fashion to become more sustainable. She gave ThredUP as an interesting example of re-use that people could easily get involved and told a story of her own engagement in a Pads program in Uganda. The biggest takeaway is that by engaging the community, you build sustainability in skills, knowledge and practice, making it a habit that is a part of people’s lives.
Hillary Carey
Hillary’s specialization is in-context research, entering the field early on most notably through her Master’s thesis, which she also pursued at CMU.
For Hillary, co-creation, prototyping and spending time in the context of the challenge are crucial factors to the success of research. She gave an example of a health project she worked on to re-design a hospital lobby. She leveraged participatory design to work with the receptionists who had so much of the knowledge, overcoming their initial discomfort while also being able to prove the value of a lobby re-design that worked for the staff members using it every day.
One of her favorite prototyping techniques to use is Wizard of Oz. This is when researchers pretend certain ideas and technology work automatically but is actually being run manually behind the scenes.
Silvana’s path started off in graphic design. After completing an arts degree focused in sustainability, Silvana began to engage with food as a tool for social change, working in the intersection of design, food and sustainability.
She mentioned that she conducts design explorations and research as a tool to discover more about societal change. In one experiment, she used food as the canvas to explore different experiences and reactions.
Silvana’s view of sustainable design can be capture by a quote she shared with the class: “sustainable design as a larger strategic process towards global, societal reconfiguration”. She pointed to the importance of seeing things at this systemic level when dealing with such complex issues.
Erica Dorn
Erica has been following a thread pursuing local economic development as well as the facilitation of human interaction and deep relationships. For her, this path started after Hurricane Katrina, where Erica worked to help businesses and the economy rebuild after such a huge disaster.
After this, she became interested in seeing how she could apply this experience to the informal economy in NYC, working with microfinance company Accion and many undocumented migrants. Her biggest insight was that people had this idea that social entrepreneurs were not leading small businesses and that often, people had one idea of success — disrupt, scale and make money. However, this negated the value of the community that a business naturally builds.
She co-founded the Good Work Institute under Etsy to introduce a kind of business school that was focused on collaboration, personal leadership and vision.
