Hello!
My name is Allen Wang. I’m a problem-solver and lifelong learner with an eclectic schema and a love for speculative, avant-garde thinking.
I was born in China but grew up in Toronto, Canada. During my bachelor's degree, I went on an exchange semester to Denmark and spent some forty-five days backpacking around Europe. Subsequently, during my master's degree at Harvard, I did a lot of fieldwork around the globe, visiting Texas, New York, Virginia, Florida, Morocco, Fukushima (Japan), India, and Nepal (where I did my capstone work).
I am interested in how individuals perceive systems that are greater than ourselves and which we can never fully understand due to their complicatedness, complexity, and ambiguity. Though I didn't realize it at the time, this started with my bachelor's thesis on rethinking systems of measurement through the human body. My master's thesis looked at perceptions of the environment, touching on climate skepticism, pollution, and ecotourism. And my professional work as a service designer looks at how users perceive institutions (be it the government or the university) and how to align stakeholders on a shared view of improving the experiences of the people they serve.
I maintain a broad spattering of interests across classical music, digital photography, languages, environmental anthropology, modern literature, continental philosophy, critical theory, psychology, art/design history, contemporary art, and so forth. I read Wikipedia for fun. I love telling stories. I’ve been working on a novel on-and-off for the past fifteen years so or. In the current iteration, it’s a recollection of sequences from my high school years, particularly some of the biking adventures I used to go on. But in reverse-chronological order.
Feel free to shoot me a message: allen.wang1023 [at] gmail.com
Statement of design philosophy: Services are the sum of complex patterns of human behaviours surrounding touchpoints between providers and consumers. Unlike outputs in other design fields, services are ambiguous because no single actor has a holistic view and no holistic view reflects the nuances of each individual interaction. User research and facilitation help us navigate in the face of ambiguity and align stakeholders on timely, incremental interventions.
Design is the responsibility to grapple with complex human problems towards optimistic ends. As a critically-trained investigator, I believe the most important question to ask is never “what” or “how, “but “who.” In my practice, I advocate passionately for the voices of users and stakeholders underrepresented in existing systems (“non-dominant perspectives”) to produce holistic outcomes.
“We followed the Highland Creek up into the beach out into a clearing of trees on into the moonlight glare down into a recollection, some recollection of a biking trip when we (when I) went searching for stars (went searching for suns in dark places) and found driftwood.”