As a people-centered designer and advocate, I love working on complex and ambiguous challenges to find where organizations can bring strong value to their customers and stakeholders. I wear many different design hats, but mostly find myself deeply engrossed in defining the right design opportunities to move into, prototyping emerging concepts, and facilitating stakeholder workshops. I’m energized by collaborative and passionate teams, and love working cross-functionally.
With my background in Mechanical Engineering, I’m inclined towards action and implementation; I enjoy seeing the big picture but also creating the steps that will lead to that final vision. With my multi-cultural upbringing and desire to keep learning from different perspectives, I enjoy learning from different perspectives to create outcomes where people can feel represented and celebrated.
Outside of my design work, you can find me exploring my city, eating new foods, learning more about my Indian culture and painting shoes!
A look into my design process…
While each project requires a slightly different process and starting point, I generally incorporate the following steps to design for both innovation and inclusivity.
See the system
Everything sits inside an existing ecosystem of products, people and behaviors. Thinking in systems serves as my starting point to help me better think about the larger impact of my project. e.g:
Who or what influences my project? Internally or externally?
Who might be excluded from this system? Why are they excluded?
Who supports my primary and secondary stakeholders?
Which system connections can I leverage?
Learn from the right experts
To guide my first steps, I learn from those who have done this before, or are most impacted by the challenge. e.g:
Whose lived experience do I need to learn from?
Who are extreme users? Who are excluded users? How will designing for them help the rest of our users?
Who are other subject matter experts?
How can I facilitate the right environment to learn from all these stakeholders?
Synthesize into actionable insights
Finding the right opportunities to work on always stems from a synthesis of multiple sources, whether that be stakeholder conversations and needs, secondary research or emerging trends. With stakeholder input, I work to identify:
Were any assumptions validated? Proven wrong?
Which opportunities will make the biggest impact? Why?
Which ones should be tackled first? Is that different from biggest impact?
How will these opportunities impact the original system?
Generate ideas & imagine
The best innovations are often already out there. It’s our job to find which ideas we can build from and which ones will push us towards the future we want. Pulling inspiration from speculative practices and analogous situations, I use collective brainstorming sessions to build a shared vision amongst stakeholders. e.g:
Who’s tried something similar? Who or what are we currently inspired by?
What future do we want? Does our organization want? Where are we aligned/misaligned?
What would move users from satisfaction to excitement?
Which ideas are eliciting the most energy from our team & stakeholders? What do those ideas say about our needs?
Create, iterate & document
My favorite way to learn about my ideas is to prototype early and iterate often. I learn best through feedback and ask myself the following:
What resources and limitations do I have?
What are the riskiest parts of this idea? What must be true for this idea to succeed? How can I test and de-risk them?
How will this fit into existing behaviors and ecosystems?
Who do I need to give me feedback on this?
Who will get this project after me? What supporting documentation might they need in the case that I might not be there to help?
In finding opportunities for investment into controlled-environment agriculture, our team was able to find multiple areas for investment and use our shared vision for a more just food future to define our final proposals.
Visualizing our understanding of the food system in Chicago helped us identify key opportunities for stakeholders to collaboratively reduce their waste.
Identifying the range of people impacted by different bra fit issues helped us reach medical experts, nurses, mothers, and surgical patients (outside of our target audience) to get a holistic understanding of how bra fit can impact the body.
Ask me about my initiative to make our graduate school community more inclusive. This image is pulled from our synthesis of student input.
When creating a playbook for medical researchers to reference during their study planning process, it was essential to consider the existing behaviors and time limitations our researchers are under. Being able to get their feedback was essential to this project.