User Experience in social work

Outside of work I love volunteering with food through a 6 weeks cooking classes program. One series I particularly enjoyed was teaching blind students at the Lighthouse, a non-profit for the visually impaired in the Bay Area, how to confidently and safely cook in the kitchen. It quickly became a user experience design exercise. I helped create new workflows of how to re-navigate a standard kitchen. The goal was to re-design using a standard kitchen as a blind person instead of architecturally re-designing the kitchen itself.

The class was such a moving experience I shared my learnings with fellow Autodesk designers. In hindsight I could frame the quick learning through the LUMA design thinking principles. It was an extraordinary moment of applying design thinking to real-life, social problems.

Video of my design talk at Autodesk: