Danielle Chen, IDSA

Senior UX Designer, Huge

As a Senior UX Designer at Huge, Danielle Chen, IDSA creates visually compelling interactions and breakthrough experiences that solve complex systematic problems while advocating for the users’ needs. She actively speaks about important social issues, both through her personal social media platform and the podcast she hosts called “Push&Play,” where she discusses the intersection between design and social issues. Previously, Danielle worked as a product designer at Hasbro, Penn Medicine, and Ernst & Young. She holds a Master’s in Integrated Product Design from University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor’s in Product Design from Drexel University.

Activism in Design

Rapid Fire Session

Track 2

Wed - Sept. 22

5:10 pm EDT

This visual paper aims to understand and address the lack of equity and inclusion in the current design process, and the disconnect it has caused between designers’ personal values and beliefs and the work they do for their jobs. The design industry is dominated by Eurocentric design, failing to address many social issues society faces, such as racial and gender inequality, climate change, inaccessibility and poverty. As countries around the world face a reckoning with racial injustices and systemic oppression, many design practitioners have started to rethink their roles and responsibilities in our society. What can we learn from activism to transform our way of problem solving to ensure a more equitable and inclusive outcome? This visual paper shares the learnings from a conversation series that
strives to understand the intersection between design and social issues, and breaks down a few opportunities in the current design process to evolve design thinking by incorporating elements of social movements.