Allen Wang
I'm a service designer, researcher, and strategist fascinated by how people navigate the complex technological, institutional, and ecological systems they find themselves immersed within. I help organizations better understand the people they serve, make sense of ambiguity, and align around actionable paths forward.
Senior service designer, University of Alberta (2025–present)
• Aligning interdepartmental teams on actionable problem framings to create the conditions for service improvement.
• Main projects: program progression tracking, institutional service directory, academic advising, & accommodations.
Master in Design Studies (Ecologies), Harvard University (2023–2025)
• Fieldwork & thesis on ecotourism in Nepal, researching lived experiences of & industry responses to ecological changes.
• 2024 Bloomberg Harvard Summer Fellow (GenAI transformation roadmap for the City of Newport News, Virginia).
Service designer, Shared Services Canada (2021–2023)
• Guided organizational transformation initiatives with deep insights into client, provider, & institutional needs.
• Main projects: future of work, AI support services, corporate reporting, personnel security screenings, & business intake.
User experience designer, Statistics Canada (2021)
• Built webpages to help non-expert users make informed choices between statistical data products.
Freelance research consultant (2021–present)
• Equipping nonprofits with qualitative and quantitative research to drive equitable & impactful program allocation.
Bachelor of Design in Industrial Design, OCAD University (2016–2020)
• 2019 exchange semester to Designskolen Kolding, Denmark.
Outside of work, you'll find me playing in orchestras, writing creative non-fiction, taking photos around the world, and going on deep-dives into Wikipedia articles.
HIGHLIGHTED PROJECTS
(Note: most of my professional projects are confidential and thus not provided on this website.)
Improving waiting room experiences at Kolding Hospital (2019).
My first service design project was during my exchange semester to Denmark, where the head of the local emergency department challenged us to improve user experiences in their waiting room. Through patient surveys, staff interviews, and site observation, we identified breakdowns in the flow of information and connection between staff and users that led to a perceived lack of care. We proposed three solutions: a communications handbook for staff, a redesigned waiting room layout, and a volunteering program for non-medical support.
An AI transformation roadmap for the City of Newport News, Virginia (2024).
In support of the new mayor's digital innovation agenda, I engaged 86 city staff across most departments in interviews and site observations to identify and prioritize 95 use-cases for generative AI into an AI-enabled transformation roadmap for city services. To secure leadership alignment on high-value directions, I developed a prioritization methodology with input from industry frameworks and city executives to account for factors including organizational risk, technical readiness/maturity, and public value.
A public space proposal & spatial strategy for the Rockaways (2024).
I synthesized community engagement workshops, site observations, and geospatial analysis to produce a near- and long-term vision for the Rockaway Peninsula in New York City. In response to ongoing social issues and gentrification, I proposed mobility corridors and programming to strengthen locals' connections to the waterfront as a site of recreation, education, and conservation—to make it a place worth going to. And as the next century of sea level rise transforms the peninsula into an archipelago, a speculative constitution celebrates the emergence and submergence of islands in the context of new social orders.
A disambiguation page for greenhouse gas emissions datasets (Statistics Canada, 2021).
To help non-expert users make informed choices between datasets, the Canadian Centre for Energy Information created a new role for me to make disambiguation webpage layouts. Facing resistance from subject-matter experts in other departments around ensuring their data products were represented accurately in a StatCan page, I pivoted from a UX approach to participatory design, facilitating structured writing workshops to co-create the final webpage.
Mapping underserved communities in a nonprofit's charter area (2021).
To inform resource allocation and enable donor reporting on impacts for underserved populations, I developed a methodology for quantifying "underserved" with reference to a literature review, the nonprofit's theory of change, and the available data, then built custom Python workflows to analyze and visualize these underserved areas.
"The Mountain-Mundane: Everyday archives of ecological metamorphoses in/from Nepal's ecotourism industry" (MDes thesis, 2025).
Mountains hold a lot more than just rock and snow; they carry stories about people and their changing relationships with the environment. To help people around the world connect with the impacts of pollution, natural disasters, and economic development in the Nepal Himalaya, I archived multimedia data from my 2024 fieldwork with service-providers in Nepal's ecotourism industry into familiar, everyday “time capsules” that tell a story: a deck of playing cards, a set of prayer flags, and a series of paperback books. The project blends environmental anthropology, critical archival practice, and product/system design to reframe ecotourism from environmental extractionism to environmental advocacy.
"A Corporeal Instrumentality Project: Interventions to restructure dimensionality through a body-centred perspective" (BDes thesis, 2020).
How does our relationship with time change when we measure it not in terms of hours, minutes, and seconds, but in heartbeats? Society’s adoption of a common standard of units, and reliance on instruments to measure said units with, is what keeps us synchronized, but we have no innate sense of this cartesian dimensioning. How might we assert the perspective of the individual, to eke out a little room to wander between the lines, to “measure” through the “performance” of our own body? What if your watch looked towards you to tell time? (This wristwatch, hacked to advance with the wearer's heartbeat, is one of several prototypes under this manifesto.)