I’m Dana
I’ve spent countless hours honing my coconut-opening skills.
I am a design researcher, service designer, and a design leader. I bring simplicity and humanity to my work, and to the teams I build and lead.
My version of HCD is “healing-centered design.” I’ve spent the majority of my career focused on improving the experience of being a patient or healthcare practitioner in the US. After hearing countless stories from people in my work, my definition of health has evolved greatly. I believe that our ability to heal ourselves and one another is boundless. Connection to ourselves, one another, and the world around us are vital ingredients.
Most recently, I was a Design Research Lead at IDEO. There, I led cross-functional, client-facing embedded teams in recruiting, planning, and conducting research and generating insights and opportunities. Our work has come to life as household brands, workplace solutions, and digital mental health products.
Personally, I’ve lived many lives, and aspire to live many more. I bring these stories to life through my own work, and to support my team’s outputs. I’m hardwired to find patterns, so synthesis comes naturally. I thrive in the early phases of product and service design projects; planning, leading and conducting design research, facilitating collaboration, building frameworks that distill complexity, and articulating insights and opportunities. The essence of whoever I am designing for permeates my design process, and is present in my deliverables. I’m also a visual storyteller, and I make in a lot of different forms. I sketch a ton, illustrate my own concepts and storyboards, am a badass deck-builder, and design for print and web in Adobe and Figma. My dream is to conduct design research all over the world to learn and share stories of how people heal themselves and one another.
In my free time, I bike, swim, play Ultimate Frisbee, draw, and wonder at absurd things. I love cooking and fermentation, and am trying to master sourdough. I also tend to write a lot. I spent the first two months of 2020 in SE Asia traveling solo. It was everything. Check out my musings on Medium.
Below is my Instagram feed. I try to use it to share things I’ve drawn, unless I’m traveling or struck by something otherwise mundane. It may help you see how my mind works.
