Team Bios
Meet the designers
Meet the Designers
Amanda Astorga-Pinto
Amanda Astorga-Pinto is a strategic designer from Chile. Her biggest passion is working alongside communities in ways that empower people and foster their participation. She has done this work facilitating workshops with school students to co-design graphic murals for a pediatric public hospital, conducting community-based research about perception of feminism and gender inequality and its effect in women’s health, strategizing approaches to help parents to talk about sexual health with their young children, and building leadership capacity with female social leaders.
Javi Arenas
Javiera Arenas is a Chilean graphic and communication designer turned strategic, service, and social designer. Her first-hand experience as a caregiver revealed how design could play a role in healthcare to help ease the burden for those in treatment and their loved ones. As a designer, she realizes she can’t fix all of the problems she cares about, but can work to design more holistic experiences that bring additional support for those who suffer, are lost or alone.
Anjali Bhalodia
By way of profession, Anjali Bhalodia is a design educator and workplace strategist. While in TD, she wants to think collaboratively about how to bring a human-centered approach to organizational and community-driven projects and processes. Anjali is currently also a behavioral design fellow at Memorial Sloan Kettering. As a fellow, she is building an ecosystem of tools and methods focused on helping designers in creating better patient and clinical staff experiences.
Tim Clem
Tim Clem is a programmer, educator, face-maker, and tinkerer living in Manhattan. He thinks a lot about the future of identity, software, cities, capitalism, and education. He is recently driven by the potential of provocative objects.
NAOKI HASHIMOTO
Naoki Hashimoto is a policy designer whose core skills and values are Law, Public Policy and Design. He has experience working in the Japanese government and dealt with Cool Japan initiatives, reconstruction from the nuclear disaster, policy for small and medium sized enterprises.
Daye Hwang
Daye Hwang seeks to investigate and leverage the power of aesthetics, creativity, and collaborative processes to heal across social, psychic, and material systems. She began studying how design might be used to increase food security in Baltimore’s food deserts as well as the neural networks of improvisational creativity for caricature artists at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Discovering the power of design as not only aesthetics, but a process of making, towards innovative social good, she joined Human Care Systems, a healthcare experience design consultancy for pharmaceuticals as design lead and user experience strategist.
Paula Kawakami Ishihara
Paula Kawakami Ishihara is a Brazilian, Japanese descendant living in New York. By way of a background in real estate research, project management, and graphic design, Paula has landed in research and strategy for social change. Her practice centers around understanding impact, from small to large scales, from a button to a worldwide strategy, through making critical decisions, working with great teams, and being empathetic.
Pamela Lama Kafati
Pamela Lama Kafati is a problem solver and design thinker. She aspires to create impact with design by applying human-centered and design thinking methodologies to develop innovative solutions to real world problems. As a transdisciplinary designer, Pamela’s main interest when approaching a problem is to understand its individual components as well as how they interact as a whole.
JENNY LIU
Jenny Liu is a designer and researcher who designs creative and evidence-based interventions using mixed-methods research, visual design, behavioral science, and storytelling. She has experience working in public health, medical, international development, and emerging technology realms.
Sudeshna Mahata
Sudeshna Mahata believes that micro-events or changes initiated will progressively result in impactful future solutions. She aspires to create this large impact as she contributes to the community by taking small steps. She intends to address challenging issues by applying her transdisciplinary knowledge in technology, design, media, and strategy.
Whitney Mapes
Whitney Mapes is an experienced strategist with a background blending art, design, and engineering. She is a graduate student in the Transdisciplinary Design program at Parsons School of Design, where she uses the design process as a way to understand and address complex, systemic social issues; prior to graduate school, she worked in research, data analysis, and strategy consulting across a range of different industries.
Alik Mikaelian
Alik Mikaelian is a strategic designer and researcher, with a background in product and graphic design. Her work is rooted in research, iteration, collaboration, and a genuine intention for understanding the infinite ways we experience the world, from the very mundane to the complex social constructs that shape them.
RACHEL MURRAY
Rachel M. Murray is a designer who helps organizations and communities cope with complex adaptive system change using service design, UX design and product management. She helps to nurture human potential through the creation of more humane, emotional, delightful products and services for a variety of sectors. Rachel is fueled by a good admixture of equity centered design, future world making, designing for wellness, systems change and more.
HANNAH ROODMAN
Hannah Roodman is a filmmaker and designer in Brooklyn whose independent work focuses on designing story-driven experiences and environments fueled by audience participation. She is driven by innovation, collaboration, and a deep desire to create empowering stories and experiences.
ANKITA ROY
Ankita Roy is a design strategist who is passionate about using creativity to work through complex, messy problems. Her expertise lies at the intersection of design research, service design and organizational design. She is currently working as a Design Strategist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where her work focuses on discovering and responding to patient, caregiver and stakeholder needs in order to improve healthcare experiences.
Anh-Ton Tran
Anh-Ton Tran is designer, strategist, and researcher. He will be completing is MFA in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons in 2019 and is a PhD Candidate in Human Centered Computing at Georgia Tech.
Megan Willy
Megan Willy is a design strategist, researcher, systems thinker, and group facilitator. Formally trained as a cultural anthropologist and visual artist with a focus in animation, she began her career as a conceptual Earth Science Animator for NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio while pursuing interests in experimental filmmaking and public performance art as a stilt walker. Then, she worked as a teacher and academic coordinator in Concepción, Chile, which cultivated her passion for communication and inclusivity. She has developed socially engaged design projects with women in coffee-growing Colombia, artisan weavers in Guatemala, and in virtual and in-person business meetings. She's also designed with older women and for people at the end of life. She believes in and practices a sensorially holistic, inclusive, and systems approach to strategic design.
Antonia Yunge
Antonia Yunge is a strategic designer from Santiago de Chile. She has experience working in graphic, information, editorial, and service design, with a special focus on healthcare. She loves participatory design and collaborating in interdisciplinary teams to achieve social impact that improves people’s lives.