This portfolio reflects the focus of my MFA program, which centered on research and service design. The work shown emphasizes how I got there: investigating a problem, mapping the systems and stakeholders involved, and testing towards a solution. Just as in product and UX design — it's the same rigor good decisions require. In depth research is what lets a design hold up once it meets real users and real constraints, and it's the foundation I bring to every product problem I work on.
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How can a large bank shift its organizational culture? Working with Itaú, a bank in Brazil, our team of four service designers researched the challenge and designed a solution that included a game, its packaging, and a supporting website. I contributed research throughout and designed the visuals for the website mockup, game, and packaging. The file includes the final presentation, the website mockup, and visuals of the final product.
What started as a brief to design a service around IKEA’s Flexible Wall concept turned into something bigger. With an industrial designer, I found that IKEA had already solved the Wall’s main pain points, so we reframed the problem around IKEA’s sustainability goals. The result was Re: Flytta, a furniture rental service that helps people who move often, starting with international students, furnish a home without buying, hauling, and throwing away furniture. I designed the final process book. The project won a 2017 Red Dot Design Award (Concept) and a 2017 European Product Design Award.
Ikea Re:Flytta
Service Design Network Academic Challenge
How does the Service Design Network engage with universities and students, and how could it do better? In collaboration with SDN, I worked with three other service designers over eight weeks to research the question. I designed and wrote the final report.
Service Design and Organizational Change
Porsche’s organizational culture manager asked our team how service design could help a company implement and manage cultural change. Working with a five-person team of service and industrial designers, I helped research the question and develop a context-driven framework. Shreya Dhawan and I were the lead authors of the resulting article, “Service Design and Organisational Change: A Context-driven Framework,” published in the Service Design Network’s Touchpoint journal (Vol. 8, No. 3, 2017).
Healthy Eating on Campus
A research project exploring how SCAD’s dining program supports, or gets in the way of, students eating well. Working with a design management student, I researched the dining experience and synthesized our findings into a process book, which I designed and produced.