The Design Exchange
I have been heavily involved in theDesignExchange, an online interactive portal for designers and researchers. The content on this portal is currently being used for 6 graduate-level courses at Haas School of Business and Berkeley Engineering as a valuable resource when teaching human-centered design methodology. Working alongside graduate students and professors at MIT, the Berkeley Institute for Design, and the Berkeley BEST Lab, I developed a framework for converting design papers and journal articles into case studies. For that I conducted user research and interviewed design educators at the university level to get a detailed understanding of our user base as well as inform future iterations of the user interface. In addition, I have been creating and writing design case-studies content for the platform, and managed a team of three undergraduate case-study writers.
TheDesignExchange provides a central repository of early design stage methods, engaging all stakeholders in the design community of practice, and integrating online learning with real case studies to demonstrate the methods. Formal design methods have been shown to have high impact on the quality and success of engineered products. Due to time constraints, courses can only cover a subset of the most popular methods. Thus it can be hard to find the range of potential methods for use in any particular problem. TheDesignExchange fills this need by organizing a wide range of disparate design research methods, developing a community of design educators and practitioners to evaluate those methods, and educating the next generation of design innovators. TheDesignExchange provides a structure to collect the many design methods in use today, their variations, and examples of use. The portal aims to support the design process by providing educators and practitioners alike with a versatile library of proven tools.
Here are a few of the design methods that I have written and published on theDesignExchange:
- Older adults with multi-morbidity: medication management processes and design implications for personal health applications
- Mobile phone users in Kyrgyzstan: A case study of identifying user requirements for diverse users
- Mobile communication tools for a South African Deaf patient in a pharmacy context
