As Director of Experiential Learning at the University of Michigan Center for Socially Engaged Design, I design educational content (workshops, online learning modules, case studies) and facilitate learning experiences that consider broad sociocultural contexts, stakeholder relationships, and power, privilege, and identity in design processes. Workshop topics follow the socially-engaged design process model, including topics around design ethnography, community engagement, stakeholder mapping, idea generation, and identity reflection. 

Students are often taught how to solve problems, but that approach can center around mainly technical skills, especially in engineering. However, considering broader contexts and humanizing design processes can improve technological outcomes, ensuring that decisions are intentional and inclusive in order to have a more effective and positive result.

I lead the development of content and train and lead a team of Graduate Facilitators, masters and PhD level students from diverse disciplines, who are deployed across our multidisciplinary campus to facilitate design workshops in a variety of courses and co-curricular settings. 

The educational tools my team and I have developed to meet these objectives with learners include a set of hybrid online/in-person learning blocks called the Socially Engaged Design Academy and custom curated workshops that are tailored to the learning objectives of a course or partner. The topics of these learning materials focus on specific design and ethnographic skills like conducting interviews, using prototypes to gather feedback, performing observations, and analyzing power, privilege, and identity in design. We are also piloting a library of diversity, equity, and inclusion case studies with corresponding discussion activities about familiar companies and products that illustrate how closely tied important questions about diversity, equity, and inclusion are to the development of systems and technologies.