Expanding Tokyo’s Human Touch
After being hit by a car at the age of seven, Kevin Yamada (MDes ’22) lost his leg below the knee. Continuous trips between the hospital and home forced Yamada to grow up in a different environment...
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Better than Pretty
(MDes ’03)Jon Friedman (MDes ’03) had been interning as a designer at Microsoft for many months before being pulled into a so-called “interview loop,” a process where he would undergo interview after interview...
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Designing Beyond Buildings: An Architect’s Strategic Shift
(M.S. Strategic Design Leadership ’25)Zubair Bhaidani (M.S. Strategic Design Leadership ‘25) had been working as a licensed architect for nearly a decade when he reached a turning point. While managing complex, multimillion-dollar...
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Education as an Investment for the Future
(M.Des. ’25)After completing his undergraduate degree in technical writing in 2019, Sai Allena (M.Des. ’25) returned to his native India during the COVID-19 pandemic in hopes of developing his own startups and...
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ID Alum Introduces Japan to Design Through Bestselling Book
(M.D.M. ’13)Kunitake Saso (M.D.M. ’13) founded his strategic design consultancy, BIOTOPE, in 2015, just two years after completing his graduate degree at the Institute of Design and learning a whole new way of...
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In Service of Design
M. Des. ’12As an officer in the United States Marines charged with building a water storage system for locals in one of the poorest countries in Africa, Douglas Jefferson Hsu (M.Des. ’12) first discovered his...
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A Humanist Explores AI
M. Des. '07By Tad Vezner How do you know things? How do you make sense of the world? Or, to be more precise, how do you comfortably inquire about information, and what’s your source of choice? Those were a...
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Driving Into the Future of the Unknown
(M.D.M. ’06)Ahn (M.D.M. ’06) seems too warm and approachable to be an agent of radical change. Yet those are the traits that she shares with her signature project, the Waymo Driver: a combination of both hardware...
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A Sustainable Approach to Public Health Innovation
(Ph.D. DSGN ’19)André Nogueira’s research—focused on how design frameworks and methods can improve the well-being of people, organizations, and ecosystems—has caught the attention of the Bill and Melinda Gates...
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Finding the Method to Create Design Solutions
(M.Des. ’22)It was during her graduate design studies in India that Gauri Bhatt (M.Des. ’22) first learned about 101 Design Methods: A Structured Approach for Driving Innovation in Your Organization, a book...