Design for Mental Health: Creating an Effective Response to Student Loneliness with Denise Ho and Andrew Baker — DT101 E60

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Denise Ho and Andrew Baker are our guests today. Denise is a design researcher practicing in the design space since the early 2000s and the Director of Design at Hope Lab. Andrew Baker is living and working at the intersection of technology and experience design. He’s the Vice President of Product at Grit Digital Health and teaches Experience Design at the University of Colorado. Denise and Andrew collaborated on a way to combat loneliness in college students. We talk about designing for mental health, Nod, an app that is helping young people avoid negative health outcomes associated with loneliness, and how college students were involved in creating Nod.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p> <p><strong>Show Summary</strong></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Denise and Andrew had very different entry points into design. Denise’s journey began with a love for people and cultures. She started her undergrad as an anthropology student, but she wanted to not just study culture, but to shape it. That led her into design. She studied product design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and landed an internship at IDEO, where she ended up staying for eight years while also teaching design at the California College of Arts. Denise opened her own design practice and started doing design research into younger generations — not just designing products for them, but also working to understand their way of seeing and experiencing the world. Now, she works at Hope Lab, where the focus is on creating digital technologies that help young people live happier, healthier lives.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Andrew’s interests were influenced at an early age by his father, a graphic designer, and his mother, a civic leader focused on social impact. He studied business and English literature at the University of Colorado, but also minored in technology, arts and