GLOBAL INNOVATION AND DESIGN INTERNSHIP

Hello UWT! My name is Jack Cheung, and I’m one of the seven interns who are working with the Global Innovation and Design Lab this Quarter. I’m a junior majoring in Information Technology and minoring in Innovation and Design. I’m also a digital art hobbyist, enjoy papercrafts, and am a casual comics and model kit collector. Whenever I find the free time, you’ll probably find me hammering away at a personal project relating to one of the three. I love working on complex projects and I like to push myself to make my work as fun and unorthodox as possible. </p><p>I aspire to work in UI/UX, and I hope to apply design thinking to work I do in that field. I’m particularly interested in and strongly value the appeal of interactivity and fun when designing user experiences, and I hope to emphasize these aspects in the designs I create in the future. I think that playful design is a compelling way to make user experience more enjoyable and fun, and I hope to explore that in my studies. 

Hello, my name is Zainab. I am currently majoring in technical communications and minoring in innovation and design. I enjoy traveling, exploring nature, painting, and cooking. My goal for the future is to be a UX Designer. I am passionate about design thinking and often use it in my daily life to find creative solutions to daily problems. I will often strategize problem solving using ideation and prototyping. I also use design thinking exercises to organize my daily schedule, to prepare for meetings, and to manage schoolwork. I am grateful for the GID Lab internship where I am learning how design thinking can positively impact society.  

My name is Cecil Susi and I am a senior at UW Tacoma majoring in computer science and systems, and minoring in Innovation and design. My focus is on user experience and interface design. I am extremely excited to be joining the Global Innovation and Design Lab as an intern for my third and last quarter at UW Tacoma. I especially look forward to designing a design thinking workshop for my peers to help cultivate creative and inclusive spaces for campus. A design invention that has positively impacted my daily life is the use of rubber grips for opening things such as twist bottles and jars. One of my family members had discovered these circular grip pads intended for opening jars at the grocery store one day and decided to buy one. Though the item is somewhat simple in design, I have found that it’s a helpful tool in the kitchen, especially when cooking. This item goes to show that a product designed to solve user issues doesn’t necessarily have to be complex.

Hello, my name is Maria Belen Villa and I am a senior technical writing major and minoring in global innovation and design in my second year at the University of Washington Tacoma. I am grateful to have received a GID Lab internship for Spring 2024 as it provides me with the opportunity to expand my horizons by creating, imagining, impacting community, and making lives easier. This internship has introduced me to the many ways UX design and technical writing are rooted in human design. Technical writing assists in the communication of complex information to users in the most straight forward way, providing them with instructions and information that they can employ when using a product. Design thinking is important because of our innate ability to find ways to make things easier. As a society, we love to make things effortless. As the saying goes, ‘work smarter, not harder’. I am excited to use design thinking to make our work and experiences effortless, and the outcomes more helpful. Design thinking, along with strong technical writing, can help us achieve this result for ourselves and our community.