My education and work experience have been a continuous exploration of the relationships between businesses and users. As an undergraduate at Drexel University, I studied design and merchandising. The blend of business and design appealed to my analytical and creative sides, respectively. My work experience includes doing marketing for a top women’s apparel designer, sales and merchandising under a fashion industry veteran and product development for a home textiles manufacturer. Working in production, wholesale and retail, I gained a thorough understanding of the linear process to deliver a product or service to the user. I learned how each segment added appeal to the customer, but, for me, the value of working with the customer was always overlooked. It was not until I pursued my Master of Industrial Design degree at University of the Arts that I discovered an integrated, collaborative design process. By involving users as co-designers in the earliest stages of ideation through development, the “guess work” was removed. I have experience applying a user-centered approach to a range of projects involving organizational, cultural and social systems. In addition, I completed an internship with a service design firm using methods such as observation, interviewing, analysis, storytelling and feedback to understand the high and low points of a user’s experience . We analyzed how the tangible and non-tangible components — products, communication, people and environments — could work together to shape richer experiences, causing increased loyalty and sustainable growth. The projects I have worked on through school, as well as my internship, affirmed many of my previous convictions, and I finally felt my work was contributing to improvement of human experiences. I have worked on several projects involving internal business processes, ranging from looking at how to improve communication during meetings to how to create a collective understanding of role responsibilities and workflows. I am currently working on my thesis, aimed at creating support for quality goods in the discount consumer goods landscape. Although my experience involves working both with internal participants of organizations and their external customers, collaborating with specialists from disciplines unique to the issues being solved allows a user-centered design process to be applied to a broad assortment of challenges. I enjoy collaborating across disciplines, because it allows designers to expand our knowledge base and make more informed decisions to most effectively serve clients and users.