Staff spotlight: Lesley Ann-Noel
For this issue's staff spotlight, we are excited to feature Lesley Ann-Noel, one of our Ocean Design Teaching Fellows.
What are some of the main projects you’ve worked on since coming to COS? Do you have a favorite?
I work both at COS and at the d.school, but the majority of my projects have been based at the d.school, since I have a design background. What I was most excited about working on is this project where I’ve developed a set of cards that try to get students to think about the user- or consumer-, who they are designing for, in more of a diverse way, such as thinking about them at a different age, with a different gender or a different race. They then have to think about how these demographic changes affect how the solution is used. This idea emerged during my experience teaching the Oceans by Design. A lot of the work I do is centered around diversity, and while this project wasn’t specifically ocean-related, I have been thinking about how it might apply; for example, how does the Oceans by Design class look for people who don’t have access to the ocean? How do we solve ocean problems for different populations with different ocean experiences?
I was also very excited about the design thinking class that I taught at the UN with support from Kevin, Eric and Andrew Hume. It was so great to hear a policy maker say that human centered design reminded him that his work was really about people.
How was your experience collaborating with our other Ocean Design Fellows? What was something you learned from those conversations with Erika and Kevin?
The first thing I learned is that people from different disciplines think differently; they have different modus operandi. Erika is from a science background and Kevin is from a law and policy background, and I’m from a design background. They would sometimes have a clear idea on what they anticipated a solution or plan to look like, whereas designers can sometimes be more vague and the solution develops out of the context. It really was interesting to me to see how the different professions worked, thought and communicated. I learned to try to make some ideas clearer from an earlier stage than I am accustomed to doing. I found that I learned to use a different kind of language to be more clear across our different disciplines, and that’s significant. I, normally collaborate with designers, entrepreneurs and educators, but I learned to communicate differently from working with them, and I think that’s incredibly useful.
Can you talk a little bit about your background in design?
I’m from Trinidad and Tobago, and in our education system you have to select an area of specialization very early. It’s literally in middle school that we have to limit the range of subjects that we study to ones that we think we will use professionally or at college. So in middle school I chose design; I didn’t know I was going to stay in this field for so long, but that’s really where it started! After secondary school, I studied industrial design in Brazil and lived there for six years, and that’s where I first saw people using design for social entrepreneurship. This is where I first saw the combination of design and anthropology. My first internship was actually for a museum in a port fishing town, called Paranagua, where I helped design an exhibit that told stories about Native Americans in the region, and a lot of the focus there was on the ocean.
I then went on to do work in a lot of different areas, including business, entrepreneurship, and strategy, but eventually went back to school to get my PhD, which focused on using design thinking to create empowering education experiences. I just defended last August and then packed up my car and drove across the country to become an Ocean Design Fellow here at Stanford.
What drives your interest? What is your biggest motivation for the work that you do?
Before I started design, I’d always loved education. I’ve always loved learning and I think school is exciting; I love meeting people at school, and I love talking with them about anything new! I think design is really exciting because it gives people space for that. I’m motivated right now by this movement towards pluriversal design, as opposed to universal design, which emphasizes that good design is also created outside of Europe and North America.
What do you like to do on your days off?
I like to travel! I’m interested in new places, people and experiences. I really like road trips, and my son and my partner are open to traveling so we love to do extreme travel these days. Within California, the trip down Highway 1 – everywhere between Half Moon Bay and Big Sur– has been the most interesting to me. But for places that are a plane ride away, the place I would go over and over and over again is Salvador Bahia, a beach town, in Brazil.
Do you have a favorite first experience with either design thinking and/or the ocean?
Some people don’t really have a first experience with the ocean, because you have always lived by the ocean. So, I don’t have a first ocean experience, because I don’t even remember when I first started going – my family used to go to the beach almost every weekend when I was a child.
I’m almost in the same place with design thinking because I’ve been in design for so long, but I do remember when I started reading about design thinking and thinking about the difference between design and design thinking. I went to a conference in England and I did a design thinking workshop where we co-created a policy to increase the use of design in our countries using design thinking methods. The people that ran that workshop did a really great job of getting everyone comfortable with design thinking, especially because there is definitely a tension between the two fields. That workshop just made the language accessible for everybody, so no one had to feel like they were defending their turf as people in design or people in design thinking. I came to love the co-creation aspect of design thinking through that experience.
If you had one message for a young student interested in multi-disciplinary approaches to problem-solving, what would it be?
Of course I wouldn’t have just one message! But the first would be about remaining open to new ideas, new possibilities – being open to the problem changing because you start off thinking you’re working on one problem and if you’re not open you might continue working on what ends up being the wrong problem. The second message is about really experimenting a lot because in design, it’s important to experiment with disciplines and perspectives and ideas. So that’s what I would emphasize – openness and experimentation.
Lesley will be moving to New Orleans at the end of June to accept an offer from Tulane University for the position of Professor of Practice in Design Thinking at the Taylor Center.
