Hi. I’m Korina Stark, and I work at Decent.
What is your role at Decent?
I’m the Product Lead at Decent, which requires a laser focus on our goals, how we’ll measure them, and creating opportunities for us to think creatively about how we’ll accomplish them. To guide us along the way, it’s evolving a set of research-backed, emotive narratives about what the future will be like for our users.
What is your background?
I’ve always made things and been around people making things. I was fortunate to learn how to swing a hammer by my father and how to thread a needle by my mother; I can’t tell you how to knit, but can show you how from muscle memory. I contemplated architecture and civil engineering, but discovering Industrial Design meant game over: here was a discipline that was both creative and technical, ran your ideas through research, concept, fabrication, delivery, and if you were lucky, the test of market viability.
I loved college. It required us to learn how to make drawings and models of anything we could think of, which was almost all by hand at the time.
The projects challenged us in different ways. One early example was to take a 5’x5’ piece of ⅝” birch plywood and create a “seating device” using no fasteners and no glue. It’s an example I use regularly because of how it was presented. The goal was not to build a chair, but a seating device, and by abstracting the goal it allowed everyone to think more freely about how they would accomplish it. I ended up creating a chaise with an undulating grid — as different from the original flat piece of board as I could make it, but still an homage to the square.
Projects to solve for a medical condition required deep dives; designing a door opener for someone with arthritis meant learning about different forms of arthritis and how they impacted grip, strength, and range of motion. But the most memorable medical project was done in partnership with a rehabilitation hospital, who asked if any of us were willing to take on their project of “a turbocharged vibrator for paraplegic men”. Yes. I would. Joke as you may about the research I had to do, autonomic dysreflexia is no laughing matter, and this device needed to be appropriate both in the home and clinical context — in other words, a perfectly difficult problem.
The only problem with graduating from Industrial Design in Vancouver, BC in the mid-90’s? No jobs. A friend from school and his cousin had recently started a Web Development company in Seattle and I jumped. In the intervening years I maintained focus on product, innovation, design, and research, accruing four patents. Six years ago, however, I needed a change.
I made a decision to only work on things that could help people or the planet, with the litmus test as follows:
Would I be excited to talk to my kids about what I was doing?
That’s when I joined Mindbloom, where we were creating apps and experiences to help people improve their lives in meaningful ways. We were acquired by Welltok which held the promise of bringing wellness to people at scale, and the opportunity to use monetary incentives as lever. There I saw what incentive designs worked, what didn’t, and dug into why. I started to see that many of the barriers were not the end users, but the people, policies, and corporate cultures shaping the wellness and incentive programs — well intentioned to be sure, but in their paternalistic application they could be downright detrimental.
In the midst of that experience I went to Harvard and periscoped down into Behavioral Economics, giving me the tools to evolve from Ariely fangirl to fledgling practitioner. I’d been studying human behavior for two decades by that point, and with these new tools it became easier to describe the phenomena I was seeing, to shape experiments and hypotheses to test, and tease out which biases and emotions were shaping people’s actions.
Why were you motivated to join Decent?
I want to have good health, and good health for my entire life. I want it for me, my family, my community, our country, and our world. I recognize that there are external factors that impact my health, such as cost, quality, access, and environment, and internal factors: my own behavior, my genetics, and my history. Decent’s mission of Affordable Healthcare for All is audacious, a perfectly difficult problem that requires us to to explore and impact as many internal and external factors as possible, by any means we can discover or devise. I am intellectually and emotionally at home here.
Why is improving healthcare important to you?
Growing up in Canada, I never had to think about basic healthcare. My parents still see the same family doctor we have had since I was a teen, and his father was our family doctor when I was a child. While the system there is far from perfect, my first experience with the US healthcare system was in Redding, California in the early 90’s, and it made an impression.
After graduating high school, a girlfriend and I drove from Vancouver all the way down to San Diego, and had started to drive back north when my friend became unwell. After her symptoms got worse, I started looking out for hospital signs on the highway, and pulled in to the first one. We both had international traveler’s insurance in addition to our standard-issue government benefits, so I didn’t even give it a second thought.
While I was waiting outside the examination room, I watched a family move slowly through the hallway. The matriarch was gaunt and delirious, held up by two family members and followed by half a dozen more of various ages. Pulling up the rear were two young men with sober expressions, running through their options to cover the medical bills. How could they get the money, one asked the other? The car was a necessity, what else could they sell? The microwave?
I sat, shocked, for a long time.
This wasn’t right. It wasn’t right then, and it’s not right today. We can do better.
Describe something not-work related you are passionate about.
Just one? Other than my kids and their assorted awesomeness? Creating memorable meals. There’s so much I enjoy about the entire process and the experience. Who’s coming, what they do/don’t eat, what they love, what I feel like trying, what’s in season, the weather — putting it together and making it happen is rewarding from beginning to left-overs, and I’m fortunate that I get to do it alongside my dear Johan with kids jumping into the fray.
A few recent dishes include: duck confit tacos with duck skin chicharones and home-pickled red onions, sous-vide grilled octopus, chilled peach-melon-mint soup, and crème fraîche ice cream — just to give you a taste. ;)
