Rethinking Service Design + Student Projects + Community Systems with Amy O'Keefe — DT101 E56

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amy O'Keefe is the Studio Director of Northwestern university’s Master of Science and Engineering Design Innovation program, where she leads the human-centered service design studio. We talk about how the pandemic and the expanding awareness of systemic racism might change services, design, project partnerships, service design studio courses, and communities of practice in design education. Show Host: Dawan Stanford</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p> <p><strong>Show Summary</strong></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amy was always interested in experience design, but in the early 90s, there wasn’t a specific discipline teaching it, so Amy had to find her own path by way of studying English literature and architecture during her college years. Her senior thesis — an examination of how people experience memorial architecture, with a focus on the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. — was her first real foray into human-centered design and experience design.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Her original intention to continue studying architecture in graduate school changed after taking a job at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she had the opportunity to dig into digital technology. Instead, she pivoted into a fifteen-year career designing digital products and services. Eventually, Amy returned to university for a graduate degree in product design. She began teaching service design while finishing up her graduate work.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Our conversation takes a look at the world today through a service design lens and talks about how service design is changing — and how it needs to continue to change — in response to what’s happening around us right now.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p> <p><strong>Listen in to learn more about:</strong></p> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style= "font-weight: 400;">Systemic racism and its effects on service design</span></li> <li styl