Senior UX Designer, Huge
As a Senior UX Designer at Huge, Danielle creates visually compelling interactions and breakthrough experiences that solve complex systematic problems while advocating for the users’ needs. She brings a sense of playfulness to her everyday work and life to create engaging and meaningful moments that connect with others, and she studies the effect play has on social impact to cultivate a positive impact in people’s lives.
Danielle hosts a podcast called “Push & Play” inviting designers to publicly call for changes and discuss the intersection between design and social issues. By researching vigorously about each topic and engaging in challenging conversations on her podcast, she works to continuously gain new perspectives and evolve her means of engaging in activism work as a designer.
She is frequently requested as a speaker and has participated in various panel discussions that aim to encourage conversations on various social issues such as the IDSA DEIC panel discussion “Race in Design: Understanding AAPI Designers’ Experiences,” “Women in Design” and “Advocating for Diversity and Equity.”
Prior to joining Huge, Danielle worked as a Senior UX Designer at Ernst & Young and a Product Designer at Hasbro and Penn Medicine. She holds a Master’s in Integrated Product Design from University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor’s in Product Design from Drexel University.
When she’s not working on design or activism, you can find her tending to her 70+ plants, petting other people’s cats, and running at different parks.
Statement of Candidacy (2022-2023 term)
The design industry is dominated by Eurocentric ideology, failing to address many social issues society faces, such as racial and gender inequality, climate change, inaccessibility, and poverty. As countries around the world face a reckoning with racial injustice and systemic oppression, design practitioners have started to recognize the importance that representation plays in our creative industry.
As more design companies and organizations work to close the gender gap by filling more leadership roles with women and hosting female-focused events, we sometimes have failed to address the intersectional experiences of people from the LGBTQ+ and BIPOC communities. While we’re seeing an increased interest in advocating for gender equality from our male counterparts, it is undeniable that continuous work needs to be done to maintain the motivation and accountability of their allyship.
As the Women in Design Northeast Representative, I will continue to create space and opportunities to inspire and empower women and non-binary designers and design students when navigating their design career and study. I will approach each initiative through an intersectional perspective to ensure an inclusive experience for all and encourage participation from allies. I’m committed to lead by example by continuing my learning in Intersectional Feminism and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and asking to be held accountable by the rest of the community.
I have been a member of the IDSA for 3+ years and have served in a leadership role where I helped organize multiple external and internal events. I have experience organizing and facilitating events with up to 1,000+ attendees in the past, and I have a deep passion in connecting with people from various backgrounds and creating space to share their stories. Having worked in both ID and UX industries, I have developed an extensive network I will leverage in building our community at IDSA.
I would be honored to be considered as part of the IDSA Women in Design Committee.
Activism in Design
This visual paper aims to understand and address the lack of equity and inclusion in the current design process, and the disconnect it has caused between designers’ personal values and beliefs and the work they do for their jobs. The design industry is dominated by Eurocentric design, failing to address many social issues society faces, such as racial and gender inequality, climate change, inaccessibility and poverty. As countries around the world face a reckoning with racial injustices and systemic oppression, many design practitioners have started to rethink their roles and responsibilities in our society. What can we learn from activism to transform our way of problem solving to ensure a more equitable and inclusive outcome? This visual paper shares the learnings from a conversation series that strives to understand the intersection between design and social issues, and breaks down a few opportunities in the current design process to evolve design thinking by incorporating elements of social movements.
Danielle Chen, IDSA has built upon the success of her GSMA-winning project Play Rekindling and accomplished so much more in 2020. Early in the year she presented at the IxDA conference in Milan, Italy and World IA Day in Philadelphia before global lockdowns due to the rising pandemic changed all of our lives this spring. While she found presenting in a virtual format frustrating at first, Danielle soon realized how much she enjoyed sharing her ideas and connecting with others, even if through a screen.
“I decided to brainstorm about who might benefit the most from this time and the virtual format, and I thought of the students who are attending design programs during this pandemic, as they aren’t able to access the same kind of design education experience as most of us have,” she says. “Since then, I started reaching out to different design programs and mentioned my interest in connecting and mentoring their students.”
Danielle has since given talks and facilitated workshops at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Drexel University, and Thought at Work from RIT, a student-run conference where designers are asked to share their creative paths. She has appeared on Advanced Design’s Context podcast and Lens conversation series and presented guest lectures and critiques at Abe Academy and Universities of Pennsylvania. She also collaborated with Headspace, the meditation app company, to create a video sharing how play can be a powerful tool to help us navigate through uncertain times, released during the week of the U.S. general election.
Looking back, “2020 has been a year of reflection for me,” Danielle says. “I was never someone who paid close attention to politics and social issues; but after the killing of George Floyd, I had a long conversation with my dear friend Hanya Moharram, who graduated from Drexel University – Product Design with me, to reflect on America’s history of social injustice and what we have been seeing and experiencing as women of color in our own lives. This conversation then spun into a few deeper ones as we started brainstorming what we could do as individuals for society, and put our design skills into work.”
From these conversations, Danielle and Hanya created the podcast Push&Play, where they discuss the intersection between design and social issues. Danielle is also vocal on social media about issues affecting international students, such as the ICE announcement in July 2020 of a new policy that would have forced international students enrolled at American universities offering exclusively online courses in the fall due to the pandemic to either transfer to a school offering in-person classes or depart the country. (This policy was later rescinded, after people like Danielle shared and signed petitions and wrote to their representatives in protest.) Now a Senior UX Designer at EY Design Studio in Philadelphia, Danielle recently participated in a panel discussion on the topic of “Advocating for Diversity and Equity” for Pratt Institute’s Career Day.
As for what’s next, Danielle says, “I will continue to be an active voice to raise awareness of the social issues we’re facing and encourage people to take actions upon them. And I want to continue to challenge myself to embrace the unknowns, explore new skills, and own my voice.”
2019 Northeast District Graduate Student Merit Award Winner
Danielle Chen is a product designer who creates experiences through the lens of play, bridging the gap of design, engineering, and business, and leveraging technology to enhance people’s well-being. She is a storyteller who seeks to identify pivotal moments for the audience with a consumer-centric approach to product and experience design, resulting in the most meaningful engagement with the end user. Danielle designs with passion and empathy through an iterative process of need-finding and problem-solving.
How will you use design to change the world?
As a designer, I always have used and will use design research to understand people’s frustrations with either products they are currently using, or challenges they are facing in their lives. I listen to and empathize with what people say thoroughly, and keep their needs into consideration when designing the end products across the design process. I will then synthesize and prioritize their needs, and turn them into meaningful and actionable insights which will later be transformed into design elements that are applicable for the intended use cases. With the emergence of technology in our lives, I believe incorporating the most suitable technology into design can create a more intuitive and engaging interaction between the people and the products to help elevate the user experience.
Danielle’s presentation at the International Design Conference 2019 in Chicago, IL.
