encouraging more New Yorkers to report discrimination on their housing search by visualizing their rights and how to assert them.
What we did:
Unlock NYC, Neighbors Together, CUP, and designer Gica Tam worked together to develop Record it. Report it!, a pocket-sized guide to the rights that New Yorkers with rental assistance vouchers have on their housing search. We developed the content based on our organizations’ know your rights workshops, and hosted two community feedback sessions during the design process.
What happened next:
We hosted a launch event for Record it. Report it! in fall 2021, where volunteers canvassed and distributed print copies at sites across the city, such as homeless shelters, subway stations, and public benefits offices. Multiple partners are distributing copies of the booklet to their constituents, and the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) shares a digital copy with every incoming voucher holder, including recipients of the Emergency Housing Voucher program.
Why it matters:
Anyone who has ever tried to use a rental assistance voucher knows that it’s unfairly difficult to find a landlord who will accept it. However, it is often not clear what phrases or practices a landlord or broker is allowed to use with potential tenants – and which ones constitute illegal discrimination. By making a complex public policy pocket-sized, illustrated, and broken down into its core components, we hope that more NYC renters with vouchers feel confident asserting their rights on their housing search.
Year: 2021
Location: Brooklyn, NY
My role: content contributions, user experience feedback, copyediting, community member recruitment, launch planning and execution
Collaborators:
CUP: Clair Beltran, Sucharitha Yelimeli
Neighbors Together: Annie Carforo, Nailah Abdul-Mubdi
Designer: Gica Tam
See booklet for additional contributors, reviewers, and funders.
improving asthma outcomes for kids by connecting clinical approaches to their lived realities at home
What we did:
As a graduate teaching intern, I co-taught a semester-long studio course where design students worked collaboratively with pediatric asthma patients, their primary caregivers, physicians, social workers, and respiratory therapists to explore how to create asthma action plans and support systems that enable smoother and safer care at home.
What happened next:
Three prototypes from our design process advanced to the testing phase in a pediatric asthma clinic. You can read more about this in a peer-reviewed article in Public Health, as a case study in Health Design Thinking, and on the MICA Center for Social Design website.
Why it matters:
Too often, a clinical encounter passes in a flash – and a patient takes home a list of instructions that are hard to understand, and don’t fit into their lives. While medical professionals often label patients as “non-compliant” or “non-adherent,” many patients aren’t set up for success in the first place. By creating a more vivid shared understanding of a child’s daily life at home, care teams can provide tailored recommendations and support to keep a child’s asthma under control.
Year: 2018
Location: Baltimore, Maryland
My role: facilitator, coaching and feedback, writing, partnership management, IRB approval
Collaborators:
MICA Center for Social Design: Franki Abraham, Katie Mancher, Delaney Todd, Kimmy Tsai, Amanda Velez-Cortes, Maddie Wolf, Christina Yoo, and Becky Slogeris (faculty lead)
Johns Hopkins Children's Hospital: Mandeep Jassal, Hilary Heslep, Christy Sadreameli, Helen Hughes, Arlene Butz, Cassie Lewis-Land, Kate Bosley
creating pathways to justice and permanent housing for New Yorkers facing discrimination on the rental market.
The project:
Housing choice vouchers are designed to make housing more affordable, especially for families who live in expensive cities. They can enable families to find a home that is safe, healthy, and accessible for them. However, many landlords discriminate – often, illegally – against people who use a housing choice voucher to pay for their rent. When tenants inquire about a listing, they face discriminatory treatment and unfair assumptions about what type of a tenant they would be.
Working closely with voucher-holding New Yorkers, we developed a chatbot that helps tenants file a complete and actionable report to the city after a discriminatory encounter – right on their phone. As a UX/UI designer on the team, my focus has been on blueprinting the user experience for tenants, advocates, and city investigators, developing the chatbot’s flow, processing reports, and analyzing our impact and usability.
What happened next:
Unlock NYC launched in January 2021. Reports filed by tenants through Unlock NYC have resulted in fair viewings, signed leases, and apologies from landlords and brokers who discriminated against members of our community. We’re now bringing on new partner organizations who will use our tools with their members/clients, and will recently launched a feature that helps tenants record their phone calls as additional evidence.
Why it matters:
Research shows that housing choice vouchers are a powerful tool for improving both physical and mental health outcomes, reducing risk factors for diabetes, obesity, depression, and more.
Further, while vouchers can improve health, housing discrimination does the opposite. We've heard from families stuck in crowded homeless shelters for years because of the discrimination they face on the housing market, or living in apartments filled with cockroaches, toxic mold, or severe structural damage because they couldn’t find a safer apartment that would accept their application. Further, the discrimination itself is perilous to mental health, causing anxiety, depression, and a constant sense of uncertainty.
Year: 2019-present
Location: Brooklyn, NY
My role: design research, UX/UI, product management
Collaborators: Jessica Valencia, Madeline Avram Blount, Manon Vergerio, our Leadership Collective, and 100+ New Yorkers with vouchers.
Implementing partner: Neighbors Together
Resourcing partners: Blue Ridge Labs at The Robin Hood Foundation, Awesome Foundation, and 100+ individual donors
using my ceramics practice to process and document my personal experiences in the healthcare system.
The project:
In 2018, I found out that I was pregnant in an emergency room 3,000 miles from home. My pregnancy had started – and ended – in the wrong place, rupturing my fallopian tube, prompting a tidal wave of internal bleeding and sending me immediately into surgery. This series in porcelain explores the aftermath of those events, and is a journal of my healing process. These wheel-thrown forms, some with ‘bruised’ glazes, represent injuries both visible and invisible – for instance, a few of the pieces in the series cannot perform their function because of something not immediately visible to the viewer.
What happened next:
Pieces from this series have been exhibited at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (Mineral Grit, juried exhibition, 2019), the Lincoln Square Pottery Studio in Chicago (Pottery of Protest, community show, 2019), and the Kaldas Center for Fertility, Surgery, and Pregnancy (The ART of Infertility, permanent collection, 2019).
Why it matters:
Ceramics offered me an unconventional outlet for engaging in patient advocacy, time and space to navigate my postoperative anxiety and depression, and an opportunity to ask tough questions about my design practice. While at the wheel, I reflected on my time managing a grant portfolio around emergency surgery (having never felt the terror of having one), designing curricula about contraceptives (having never had an unplanned pregnancy), and building features for a medication adherence app (having never undertaken such a rigorous pill regimen). Facing well-intentioned, but harmful, questions and assumptions about what happened and what I wanted crystallized my resolve to ensure that people with lived experience are in positions with real decision-making power on every design team I’m part of.
Year: 2018-2019
Location: Baltimore, Chicago, and Wisconsin
building a hospital-wide patient safety movement by tapping into personal storytelling
The project:
I facilitated a storytelling workshop with patient safety leads from around a large hospital system to generate dialogue around what inspired them to specialize in the science and practice of reducing medical error and improving quality of care. The worksheet tool I developed, inspired by the public narrative work of Marshall Ganz, is featured in the Storytelling chapter of Health Design Thinking (MIT Press, 2020).
Year: 2018
Location: Baltimore, Maryland
Collaborator: Johns Hopkins Hospital
using stop-motion animation to explain why it’s hard to talk about medical error and patient safety
Year: 2018
Location: Baltimore, Maryland
Collaborators: MICA Center for Social Design, Johns Hopkins Hospital
taking a multidisciplinary approach to ensuring that every person has access to safe, timely, and affordable surgical care when they need it.
What we did:
In 2015, I was a senior consultant in the global health practice of Dalberg, where my projects often included conducting research and analysis for major foundations to guide their grantmaking strategies. While exploring the area of universal access to safe, affordable surgical care with the GE Foundation, we identified a need for multidisciplinary organizations to collaborate to improve not just one piece of the puzzle, like electricity for hospitals or technical skills for surgeons, but instead transform entire hospitals by investing in leadership by the surgical teams at those facilities. This research became Safe Surgery 2020 – a multi-component program to explore innovative models for expanding safe surgical care globally.
I first joined the Safe Surgery 2020 team during its design research phase, and thereafter agreed to step into a program manager role for the first year of implementation. In these capacities, I played a number of roles – from coordinating and conducting research in Ethiopia and Tanzania, to collaborating with designers to develop the initiative’s brand and marketing, to representing the initiative in government meetings, conferences, and partnership meetings around the world. I also developed and coordinated a 2-day strategy summit that allowed for reflection, relationship-building, and planning among core partners. At the end of my term, I managed the recruitment, interview, and on-boarding process for my successor.
In the process, I learned a tremendous amount about the opportunities and challenges of getting things done in global health –from building durable relationships with multidisciplinary partners who have different approaches and organizational cultures, to the limits of global health infrastructure to truly centering the leadership of those closest to solutions – surgical teams and patients themselves.
What happened next:
Over the course of the 5-year initiative, Safe Surgery 2020 reported having implemented programs in 58 health facilities in 3 countries, trained over 2,900 healthcare workers (in areas including leadership, patient safety, and clinical skills), and launched 2 oxygen plants to improve oxygen availability at 40 medical facilities. Some of our partner hospitals in Ethiopia increased their surgical volume by over 50%, reduced surgical mortality by 1/3, and reduced referrals by 78%. In Tanzania, surgical safety checklist use increased by 44%.
Why it matters:
Billions of people worldwide cannot access surgical care when they need it. What drew me to this work was learning how hospitals who could handle three types of common procedures – C-section, open fractures, and laparotomies – could have a transformative impact on the health and wellbeing of their communities. As someone whose life has twice been saved by laparotomy/laparoscopy, this issue hits home for me personally. It was also learning that, while access to equipment and tools is crucial, so is leadership, teamwork, and sound processes to ensure patient safety.
Year: 2016-2017
Location: Ethiopia, Tanzania
My role: Project management, program design, design research
Collaborators: During my time with the initiative, I coordinated across a wide variety of collaborators including Dalberg (my employer at the time), Jhpiego, Harvard Medical School’s Program in Global Surgery and Social Change, the G4 Alliance, Assist International, and the Ethiopian Ministry of Health. You can find the full list of initiative partners on the Safe Surgery 2020 website.
