Joie Zhang is an equity and community-centered design researcher and service designer whose work revolves around building capacity with communities at the intersection of public engagement, climate justice, and innovation to design services for the public good. With years of experience in research, facilitation, and service design, she seeks to improve the ways in which communities, organizations, and local governments can better co-design together to amplify community-led solutions.
Prior to joining Hester Street, Joie worked in Detroit at the neighborhood to city scale to reorient flooding preparedness to be more collective, and less overwhelming, using human-centered design and behavioral change strategies to co-design a series of interventions with residents, CBOs, and elected officials. Her biggest strength is injecting fun, creativity, and joy into design to incentivize greater public participation.
Most recently, Joie won the Jean Paul Slusser Award for her work in Detroit and has presented at the HASTAC Design Conference and Design Futures Forum. She was also a Dow Sustainability Fellow and Association of Community Design Fellow. She holds a B.S. in Architecture from Washington University in St. Louis and a M.Des in Integrative Design from the University of Michigan.