Cara Kritikos

Iora Primary Care has nearly 50 clinics across the US, serving primarily lower-income seniors with a unique value-based, human-centric care model. As COVID-19 made its way to the US, it became clear that in order to keep our vulnerable patients and care teams safe, we needed to rapidly pivot our care delivery model to primarily virtual care. Over the course of 2 months, our Service Development team led the expansion of our care delivery model in 3 areas: Video and phone visits, web-based phones, and a tablet service to enable more patients to benefit from video visits. Over the month of April, Iora moved from doing just a headful of video visits to over 1,000 per week. Read more about the rapid transition our team led in this Medium post from the Rushika Fernandopulle, CEO.

Young people accessing sexual and reproductive health services are often faced with stigma, judgment and provider bias. YLabs, a social impact design firm based in Oakland, is working in partnership with local experts in Pakistan, Burkina Faso and Tanzania on a 3-year project called Beyond Bias, to use the human-centered design process to design, build and scale solutions that improve the quality of care and information for youth.

In Stage 1, YLabs built empathy for youth as well as healthcare providers, through interviews, co-design workshops, focus groups, and role plays, seeking to understand the challenges they face in receiving and giving youth family planning services. Other project partners performed a rigorous segmentation analysis to augment the qualitative research. In Stage 2, YLabs synthesized their design research and built seven rough prototypes based on their findings, and in Stage 3, each prototype was tested for impact and user desirability in each country.

I joined Stage 3 for testing the rough prototypes in Burkina Faso, where the project lead and I each conducted 35+ hours of interviews with local midwives and nurses and a few young girls. In addition to ethnographic-style interviews, in order to test each of the prototypes we incorporated card sorting exercises, storyboard presentations, audio recordings,  interactive digital prototypes, and co-design activities. We came away with strong insights about which rough prototypes (with which modifications) could help reduce provider bias, as well as deeper understanding of the other factors that impede youth access to family planning services, and how we might be able to address those through our solutions.

For this rapid project, a leading furniture brand approached us with the goal of differentiating itself from the competition through new service offerings, and to learn more about Human-Centered Design in the process. Winnow brought team members into the field to shadow customers, retail associates, and delivery personnel.

Halfway through the project, we led a workshop with employees from across the organization, where we presented a user journey and innovation opportunities based on our research, brainstormed together, and selected ideas for us to prototype. We then rapid-prototyped three concepts and field-tested them. In a final workshop, we shared findings about the concepts and the process with the client to help guide their next steps.

A nutrition products brand that is a staple among athletes, and is now ready for a wider audience, asked Winnow to understand how healthy eaters think about food and food shopping. I recruited a wide variety of wellness seekers in 2 West Coast metro areas. We conducted in-home interviews to uncover what influences health decisions, what tools support their goals, and what steps brought them to where they are today. We worked closely with the client to fine-tune what findings were most valuable for them, and delivered foundational frameworks as personas and stages of health-seeker customers, as well as marketing strategies to get in front of them.

Winnow was asked by a late-stage men’s clothing startup to help them understand how men make decisions around clothing. Our all-female team was excited to delve into how men think about - or don't think about - shopping and dressing.

I recruited 18 diverse male shoppers in 3 cities for in-depth in-home interviews, paired conversations, shop-alongs, and closet tours. I also conducted a diary study with an additional 16 men, to uncover the lifecycle of a wardrobe. After synthesizing learnings about fit, style, brand, social context, and lifestyle requirements, we developed frameworks comparing 4 different goals and 3 different mindsets for shopping. I assisted with a presenting our work in a hands-on executive workshop that included specific opportunities to support and delight customers with unique services.

In 2+ years at Oru Kayak - a fast-growing outdoors start-up making award-winning origami-folding kayaks - I tackled a wide range of design projects. The common thread was making each step of the user experience more human-centered. From marketing, to retail, to product design, to assembly guides, I used insights from our incredibly active and supportive community of users to improve understanding, reduce frustration, and increase joy at each step. Here are a few highlights of that work, all aimed at making it easier for more people to get outside.

During my 2 years at Oru Kayak, company sales tripled, and shifted from 100% direct web sales to 75% retail, 25% direct. As we moved into retail stores, there was an urgent need for retail packaging for various products. In a series or charrettes with our Design and Sales/Marketing teams, and an outside consultant, we established a retail design strategy. That strategy guided my designs through a shifting landscape of needs based on retailer requirements, order volumes, production logistics, costs, and physical constraints of the products.

Two days after Trump's inauguration, I went to my first meeting of IndivisibleSF - one of nearly 6,000 Indivisible chapters that sprouted up to give progressives a way to impact politics, through pressuring our Members of Congress. ISF quickly became my home as an activist, but as San Franciscans with three Democratic MoCs, our large, multi-talented chapter sought ways to create impact beyond the suggested Indivisible methods. Five other members and I decided to support other Indivisible chapters around the country, through customized sharable graphics that would help them spread their messages.

With our backgrounds in astrophysics, film-making, coding, data-analysis, and design, our tight-knit team developed a process for quickly creating data-driven graphics custom to every state, senator, or congressional district in the country, then getting them to the people who could use them to engage citizens, primarily through Twitter (@indivisibledata). Indivisible National learned about our work and helped distribute it, and started commissioning specific projects. One of our graphics to help save the Affordable Care Act even showed up on The Rachel Maddow Show.

While I don’t consider myself a graphic designer, it’s been incredibly rewarding to use my design skills for causes I’m passionate about, and it’s always good to practice designing in tight constraints under tight deadlines. Getting to work with this amazing team has been a definite silver lining in this past year in politics.

Industrial Design Thesis

Given the design brief "Fear" and the assignment to design a new physical product, I focused on a personal fear of heat and dehydration. This led me to the challenge of reducing heat-related illness in farm workers.

After learning about farm worker demographics and statistics, the science of heat-related illness, and existing measures to protect workers, I started talking to people: OSHA regulators and rural lawyers, then non-profit workers, who introduced me to a farm worker committee and a labor company owner who told me his perspective, and gave me full access to his managers and workers in the fields. I learned about the challenges to keeping workers healthy, including economics, the complexities of farming, and cultural beliefs about health and work ethics.

I learned that hydration was the most effective prevention, and that making it easy and comfortable to carry water into the fields was the best opportunity. After extensive prototyping, I brought my final models back to the workers, whose enthusiastic feedback was validating, and whose willingness to pay for the product was surprisingly high.

Industrial Design 4
2-person group project

Assigned to design a product related to food or eating, my partner and I chose to focus on addressing food waste: 40% of the food produced in the U.S. gets wasted.

Restaurants' small margins incentivize them to reduce waste, but in 2014 Americans spent a smaller percentage of income on food than at any other time in history, contributing to wasted food, so we targeted home cooks.

We found that the best opportunities were in helping users know what food they had that needed to get eaten soon, and helping them keep it for longer. Our solution was a smart device to remind users when to eat selected items, as well as a flexible lid that kept leftovers safe longer.

Industrial Design 5

Our brief for this project was to design a product inspired by the emotion, anticipation. I knew I wanted design an outdoors product, and after exploring and visualizing various moments of anticipation that might happen outside, I found an opportunity I was passionate about: creating the ambience of a campfire when you can't have a campfire. Sitting around a fire is one of the great pleasures of camping (and arguably of being human) but in California and other parts of the West, there's an increasing number of places where fires are banned due to wildfire risk. Other times, it's just not practical to build a wood fire, but you still need a centerpiece to gather around. LEDs have become ubiquitous in camping lanterns for providing compact, energy-efficient, bright light, but they don't come close to fulfilling the same emotional role as a fire. With this challenge defined, I set about prototyping to find a collapsible solution that was compact and lightweight for transporting in a pack, but transformed for the evening. While nothing can really replace a fire, this gets a little bit closer to something to tell stories around.

Intel-sponsored studio: DataX
Group project

For this joint Interaction Design/Industrial Design studio sponsored by Intel, our team was challenged with improving communication between urban citizens and civic governments.

Focusing on Potrero Hill, we interviewed a range of different residents, as well as an urban planner, and found that currently only a small number of very active citizens get heard at City Hall, and the feedback is difficult to sort through.

To help more people get heard, and help the city get more actionable data, we designed a system of mobile, interactive blocks for public spaces that make it fast, fun, and easy for everyone to be an active citizen. We were one of two teams selected to present our project to Intel in Hillsboro, OR.

Design Research for Interaction Design
Group project

Inspired by a study finding a strong correlation between having friends in old age and longer life-expectancy, we were challenged to help older adults make new friends.

We interviewed target users both from our own networks, and who we recruited online, to learn about their challenges with new friendships. Additionally, we designed "manipulatives" to gain more insight. We learned that the key wasn't helping users meet people, but helping them build friendships with people they'd already met. We were also surprised by how open users were to a digital platform, as long as it was easy to use.

Our solution was a concept for a web-based service to connect older people through organized activities. The service also provided transportation to activities: a major barrier to friendship for older users.