In addition to my professional work, I recently founded a meetup group — Designing for People NYC, based on my experiences as a meetup attendee for the past few years. I attend many networking events, case-study presentations, and workshops, and while I find they are quite inspirational in the moment I often don’t know what to do with the information being shared. This, along with my suspicion that there are methodologies and conversations which are siloed within certain design industries, inspired me to start my own community and series of events that are designed to be useful and actionable. The group convenes all sorts of folks who design experiences for people—from architects, to urban planners, to product designers, to service designers, and more. In gathering designers from many different industries, I hope to facilitate the sharing of concepts, methods, and tools between members— helping us all to expand our design processes.

I plan to experiment with the format of events. Along with trying shorter, snappier case study or methodology presentations (perhaps in the style of PechaKucha), I’d also like to host mini hackathons and workshops, taking the sharing of concepts and methods to the next level by actually putting designers from different industries together to work collaboratively.

My goal for each event is to ensure that attendees come away with actionable ways to use what they’ve learned. Even case study presentations, which are typically passive, can be designed with intention to impart relevant and usable information.

Our first event focused on Participatory Design. Participatory Design (also known as co-design) is an approach to design that attempts to involve all stakeholders in the design process in order to create an outcome that meets their needs. Our speaker Eulani Labay gave a presentation introducing the method and how it can be used throughout the design process, with specific examples from her own work—showing how interacting with people can happen at any stage of design and in any field.

While the pandemic has put a damper on in-person meetups for now, I plan to launch a virtual series soon.

My work on this project included:
Strategy, User Research, Event Design, Event Production, Marketing, Collateral Design, Speaker Recruitment