Designer~Teacher

Design Studios

This studio addresses the life event of pregnancy and explores this diffuse domain as a site for understanding the nature of wicked problems. We focus on pregnancy and childbirth with the intention of addressing issues of agency, over-medicalization, and problematic social narratives it faces. We examine ways to normalize and understand pregnancy socially, through research and enabling tools and artefacts. Through the studio we address the systems surrounding pregnancy by mapping out how women’s and family narratives are often subsumed in the larger discourse of healthcare systems. We examine the body as the site for our investigation. We also explore how individuals or communities, some who may be marginalized economically, racially or in other often subversive ways, can claim, reclaim, and develop, an understanding and agency around this natural body process. The studio will include perspectives and talks from practitioners from the Birthplace Lab at UBC—and researchers working with obstetric violence, and marginalized women.

Design Studies

Tic-Tac-Toe is a Design Studies tutorial that explores strategies and methods of approaching and revealing design thinking. Over one semester we explore 9 propositions that form alternatives to the status quo and offer ways to challenge design strategy. These tactics are a random selection of 9 – yet they offer a discourse on how we might interrogate the ideas we assume are critical to the essence of design action: The 9 tactics explored Generosity, Empathy, ReUse, Repair, Reduction & Reframing, Play, Futuring, Co-working, and finally Making. At the end of 12 weeks each participant proposed a tactic that offered an alternative to an already understood design thinking practice. This reveals how this might be demonstrated in a project.This a a compilation of 16 design tactics proposed by the participants of the Tic-Tac-Toe, design Studies Tutorial, 2017.

Honours Supervision