Allen Wang: Design Portfolio

Allen Wang

2025–present: Senior service designer at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada. Improving student services.

2023–2025: Master in Design Studies (Ecologies), Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

• Capstone fieldwork in Nepal (5 weeks), plus 2 months of other fieldwork in Japan, Morocco, India, Texas, Florida, and New York.

• 2024 Bloomberg Harvard Summer Fellow (in Newport News, Virginia, on generative AI use-cases for city services).

2021–2023: Service designer in the Government of Canada.

2021–present: Freelance researcher for non-profit organizations.

2016–2020: Bachelor of Design in Industrial Design, OCAD University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

• 2019 exchange semester to Designskolen Kolding, Denmark, with 40+ days spent backpacking around Europe.

Adventure-seeker, classical musician, amateur photographer, creative writer, history nerd, and avid Wikipedia reader....

CURATED WORK

"The MOUNTAIN-MUNDANE: Everyday archives of ecological metamorphoses in/from Nepal's ecotourism industry"
(2024–2025, MDes capstone)

Based on my month of fieldwork with service-providers in Nepal's ecotourism industry, my master's thesis at Harvard explored a design research practice that archives perceptions of environmental precarity into familiar objects in everyday places. As a transition strategy to reframe ecotourism from environmental extractionism to advocacy, these "time capsules" (e.g., playing cards, prayer flags, and paperback books) are not buried underground. Instead, people can buy them in stores, share them with friends, use them to pass the time, preserve them as souvenirs, and catalyze them to tell stories about how the changing mountain environment is destabilizing ecologies, futures, and ways of life.

Service design in the Government of Canada
(2021–2023)

Shared Services Canada provides enterprise IT services to departments in the Government of Canada. In two years at SSC's in-house customer experience consultancy, I collaborated with other teams to improve service-delivery to internal and external users, following a triple-diamond framework (problem, solution, implementation). Cumulatively, across eight client-facing projects covering topics including AI, return-to-worksites, corporate reporting, and personnel security screenings, I facilitated 100+ hours of consultations with 500+ stakeholders.

Service design for Kolding Hospital in Denmark
(2019)

My first brush with service design came during my exchange semester, where I worked with three other students to improve patient experiences in the waiting room for Kolding Hospital's emergency department. Through semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observation, we identified the central problem as obstructed flows of information in and out of the room, exacerbated by attitudinal, environmental, and systemic issues that contributed to a perceived lack of care. We proposed three solutions: a communications handbook for nurses, a room layout with improved eye contact, and a volunteering program to shore up gaps in non-medical support.

Berlin Wall design research: mineral, landscape, haunted house
(2019, 2023)

I've had a recurring interest on the Berlin Wall since I first visited Berlin and encountered "certified authentic" fragments in a souvenir shop. In my first semester at Harvard, I expanded on my undergraduate projects to explore the Berlin Wall in three ontologies: as an anthropogenic mineral, as a landscape of political extraction, and as a "haunted house" in an expanded field of preservation. Despite "falling" in 1989, the Berlin Wall's phantom presence (a "post-structure-ism") remains alive and well.

A Corporeal Instrumentality Project: Interventions to restructure dimensionality from a body-centred perspective
(2019–2020, BDes capstone)

For my Bachelor of Design thesis at OCAD University, I created an alternative set of devices to measure space and time, not through rigid Cartesian units like metres and seconds, but through a non-linear, body-centric dimensionality inspired by Situationism. Among the many corporeal instrumentality projects I hosted on a wiki-based repository to explore corporeal cartography, my favourite was a maker tutorial for how to “hack” a wristwatch to advance on the variable rhythm of the wearer's heartbeat (rather than the steady oscillations of quartz). What if your watch looked at you to tell time?

Freelance research for non-profit organizations
(2021–present)

I do research contracts for non-profit organizations to expand my horizons, hone my skills, and give back to the community. I have tackled topics related to underserved communities, program delivery, and market competition. In every project, I challenge myself to not just leverage my existing skillset, but also my knack for picking up new skills, in order to produce optimal results for my clients. For example, I learned Python to analyze and generate maps from Statistics Canada's Census of Population. What I love about research is producing net-new knowledge that goes beyond what currently exists in textbooks.

Side-project: recording a piano concerto by myself
(2020–2023)

I first heard Sergei Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor in autumn 2019, when I was playing in the viola section of the University of Toronto Campus Philharmonic Orchestra. After learning the piano part myself as a COVID project, I had the idea to bring in my other two instruments (viola and cello) into the fold and produce a video wherein I would accompany myself performing the concerto in full. After some experimentation, I recorded the piano part at home across three weekends in July 2023, then recorded the cello part while listening to the piano part, then recorded the viola part while listening to the piano and cello parts together. You can find the result on YouTube.

Digital photography