Thank you for visiting my portfolio. Here are some fun facts about me!

My experiences

I went to Carnegie Mellon for undergrad and U of Washington for grad school. In between my academic years, I've worked as a designer at Penn Medicine and GlaxoSmithKline.

Chemist-turned designer

I used to be a biological chemist and was doing lab research on RNA. I'm still intrigued by life sciences and am exploring the intersection of design and science.

Spare time

Outside of the design world, I'm a decent chef, an amateur plant dad, a passionate landscape photographer, and a keen gamer.

"Where are you *really* from?"

I was born and raised in Shanghai, China. I'm quadrilingual and a proud Shanghai dialect speaker.

Song recs?

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My core values as a designer

Design with diversity in mind

I consider a lot of design flaws we're seeing today to be results of false assumptions due to lack of diversity. Being a minority myself, I strive to contribute to inclusive and universal design, as well as to acknowledge my internal biases as an individual when making decisions.

Design for human

In the capitalistic society we're in today, the increased focus on solely dehumanized metrics, such as number of users or retention rate, worries me how we are derailing from the foundation of human-centered design. I aspire not to design by exploiting human, but to design for and with human to support solving their or our problems.

Design to catalyze thinking

I believe design can be more than a just a problem-solving tool. I'm motivated to explore fields including speculative design and critical design to facilitate thinking and discussion, and to empower people to become involved co-designers.

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© 2021 Mike Dong