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Nathaniel Rodriguez

Electrical Engineering / Computer Science / Class of 2021.

LinkedIn / GitHub

Combining my interests of technology development and human interaction, I've worked as a design researcher, web developer, and interaction designer for nearly a year. I hope to keep working in the field of human-centered design, hopefully on projects with a technological twist.

An Engineer in a Designer's World

The ReImagine UCollege project gave me an in-depth exploration of what a interaction-based, human-centered design process looked like--from face-to-face interviews to creating frameworks to model career testing to prototyping, prototyping, and more prototyping, I was exposed to a deeper dive in the design process than a single class or conference could ever teach me.

My background is primarily in electrical engineering and computer science, so design research and human-centered design as fields of work were really out of my comfort zone. Working in design required a shift in mindset and an openness to adopt a completely unfamiliar set of rules.

Cardboard Walls
My "Laboratory"

Cardboard “walls” line every wall of our team’s humble January Hall conference room. Each of these walls hosts several stacks of notecard-sized snippets of information that we’ve gathered from interviews with over twenty people about their career paths, where they want to go, where they have come from, and where WashU lies in the picture of their life. These stories from St. Louisans complement an equally large dataset composed of snippets of national and regional economic statistics, city and county demographics, economic mobility data, and peer institutions’ analysis of St. Louis to give us a picture of what the St. Louis economic landscape looks like—and who is being left behind.

I helped develop frameworks and spot trends in human-based data.

Our team spent hundreds of hours interviewing, analyzing, and compiling information from our participants and their experiences with UCollege and the St. Louis job market. With this wealth of information, I helped create guiding frameworks to help generalize trends in our respondents' behaviors by synthesizing snippets of interviews. I compiled thematic summaries of our observations, a sample of which are displayed below.

I learned a myriad of human-centered design techniques.

I learned the difference between creating a solution for a community and creating a solution with a community and the emphasis that each design approach takes. Typically, when I am given a problem to solve in an engineering context, my job would involve meeting with other students (who are also in engineering), and together, we would draft and prototype a solution for our client--be it in a class, a student group, or a real-world project. It would be a solution developed for, but not with, a community. The human-centered design process delegates designers and consultants to a listening role; the community is built from experts whose lived experience informs your work. With that in mind, my first job was to listen, and only then could I work with my team to critically think about what changes are needed.

Website Touchpoint

As we developed prototypes and policy recommendations, we kept our interviewees in mind and asked them for input on our suggestions, as well as make modifications to our concepts. We hosted several brainstorming sessions, where I would facilitate a small group in drafting a barrage of ideas that were later used to inspire our solutions. Afterwards, I drafted storyboards and touchpoints for the interviewees to guide our feedback discussions.

Sample Storyboard
Sample Storyboard
Sample Storyboard

Get In Touch

I hope to keep contributing to this type of work. There's something innately fascinating about observing human behavior and how people interact with systems that we design. I've used some of the lessons learned from this project to inform other projects of mine, as well as in my mentoring with younger students, and maybe I can contribute to yours?

LinkedIn / GitHub