Design 21: Social Design Network

I first became interested in Social Design while studying abroad in China. I remember visiting a rural town in Yunnan Province and seeing a family who had developed a system for transforming their waste into heat for a winter green house and energy for their gas stoves and indoor lighting. They used the byproduct as fertilizer for their crops. I thought what they did was ingenious and I wanted to be a part of it, so when I returned the United States, I decided to enroll in an interdisciplinary program called Science, Technology, and Society (STS) at Lehigh University so that I could study other cases of how technology could be used to create a better society and healthier planet. However, STS taught me more about the negative implications of technological innovation, and was more concerned with a theoretical examination of how society and technology are interconnected into a seamless web. After leaving Lehigh, I still wanted to learn how technology could help the world, rather than just hurt it. And so I decided to work my way into the industrial design and architecture professions. I currently work at Michael Grave's Design Group as a model maker, and am avidly seeking out opportunities to apply design towards the common good.