Helping you streamline experiences and services, turning complexity into elegant, effective solutions

As a digital experience designer and researcher. I don’t just manipulate pixels, I listen to people and their needs to shape better outcomes.

Work

WASH (Water, Sanitation & Hygiene) Behavior Change Curriculum for Ethiopian Schools

EVALUATIVE + GENERATIVE RESEARCH + DESIGN
Public Health • Behavior • Education

  • Poor hand-washing practices and waterborne illnesses are the leading cause of disease and death in children in Ethiopia. How might we use behavior change as a tool to tackle this?

A Technology-Forward System to Enhance Plastic Waste Disposal at Research Labs

GENERATIVE RESEARCH + SERVICE DESIGN
Climate • Technology

  • Academic labs generated 12 billion pounds of plastic waste in the year 2020. How might we develop sustainable practices to reduce the generation of plastic waste in this context.

Behind the Label: Improving Awareness on Consumer Food Choices

SELF INITIATED RESEARCH SPRINT
Health • Education

  • How clean and healthy is the food that I’m buying? Why can’t I pronounce some of these ingredients and why do they all sound… hazardous?

Case Studies

Designing Humanitarian Aid Tools for Ukrainian Refugees in Poland (UNICEF)

GENERATIVE RESEARCH
Design for Emergency • Service Design

  • Millions of women and children have been fleeing the war in Ukraine since February 2022. How do we make sure that UNICEF’s Blue Dot facilities are equipped to meet the demands of this emergency?

Enhancing Mental Health and Adolescent Sexual Health Services in Ghana (UNICEF)

EVALUATIVE RESEARCH & REPORT
Public Health Systems • ASRH

  • How might we effectively overcome the stigma and accessibility barriers surrounding mental health and adolescent sexual health services in Ghana, to foster a more supportive and inclusive environment for life saving services.

More Work from the Archive

Vaccine Acceptance Programming for Africa and Asia

GRAPHIC DESIGN + PUBLICATION
COVID-19 • Public Health

  • How might we boost vaccine acceptance that addresses human behavior and social contexts, to overcome hesitancy and ensure broad, effective coverage.

Open IDEO Challenge: Health Economics and Cancer Screening

RESEARCH SPRINT
Health Equity • Access

  • More than half of all cancer deaths are entirely preventable. How might we catch cancer early —by empowering women to take charge of their health?

A few wonderful people I have collaborated with

Katrina Varlam
Sr. Graphic Designer
[Sam’s manager at Common Thread]

“I loved the feeling that Sam could take on any task and say, "I'll figure it out", even if it was all blurry and complicated. She is an enthusiastic learner, a person who gets things done and looks out for what else can be solved today. With the researcher mindset she has, she is also a dedicated graphic designer, attentive to detail, function and aesthetic.”

Beth A.Eagle
Professor, Director
[Sam’s mentor at Brown University]

“Her strong research skills and human-centered design approach consistently led to innovative outcomes. Whether leading or contributing in the classroom or on partnership projects like the one we did with the Museum of Science, she was always dedicated to delivering high-quality work that exceeded expectations.”

Gael Welstead
Sr. Service Designer
[Sam’s collaborator at Common Thread]

“Sam is relentlessly curious and creative. An absolute joy to work with, she is eager to learn and build on her ideas with team input as well as confidently building out concepts on her own. I found working with Sam incredibly motivating - I would recommend her for any team looking for a generous and energetic collaborator.”

Experiments & Play

Future Scenario: A World Devoid of Bees, Four Millennia into the Future

SPECULATIVE THINKING & RESEARCH
Climate • Futures • Augmented Reality

  • Bee populations have been dwindling around the world, over the past decade. How do we sensitize communities with imaginative storytelling to illuminate how nature’s natural systems will be distorted if bees and other pollinators go extinct?

  • From the synchronized pulsation of heartbeats to the intricate interplay with temporal awareness, this exhibition display sought to elucidate the profound connection between our physiological rhythm and the subjective flow of time.

Breaking The Notion of a Book Being a Box— A Visual Experiment

PUBLICATION DESIGN
Writing • Documentation

Learning to Create Fractals Using Parametric Functions with P5.js

CREATIVE CODING
Art • Play

  • What started out as a need to learn a tool for data visualization, became something I started fiddling around with, for the sheer joy of learning something from scratch