DA - Miya Osaki AUD FINAL

SONIC Northwestern20min

Moya Bailey

00:02

ICA presents

Moya Bailey

00:03

Hello and welcome to the Digital Alchemy podcast brought to you by the International Communication Association Podcast Network. My name is Moya Bailey. I’m an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University and the founder of the Digital Apothecary Lab. For this episode, I’ve invited Miya Osaki to join me in discussing Digital Alchemy and how it applies to her work in the Design for Social Innovation MFA program at the School of Visual Arts. I'm so happy to have you, Miya, here to talk on the Digital Alchemy podcast. I wanted to start with just a little bit about who you are, how you got started. And with that, I'm also asking what is your work, and what brings you joy in relation to your work?

Miya Osaki

01:09

I am so honored to be here, first of all. We had a very serendipitous, unexpected meeting. And I've just been thinking about you. So my name is Miya Osaki. I use she/her pronouns. I am in Brooklyn, New York right now. But I am a California native. I'll tell you a little bit of background on me and how I identify. I'm a designer by background, an educator-advocate of care. I am a third generation Japanese-American, which means that my parents were incarcerated during the internment of the Japanese during World War II. So I was raised with a really deep-rooted sense of justice that the world could be better. It comes with a lot of baggage and feelings to unpack in my own background. I would consider myself having a background in activism, anti-racism, human rights, feminism, and I'm also a parent and navigating that world as well. So I am concerned about the future. That is really where my work centers. I have a deep-rooted interest in health because I feel like it is integral to all life. I'm very deeply concerned about how to preserve the health of our systems. I feel that my exploration and care has been a part of that. So I've been spending a good portion of my current thoughts these days thinking about care and really teasing that apart to really understand how care shows up. What does it mean to care? I feel like I’ve been questioning if care always defaults positive. And that's really allowed me to expand some of my thinking on how do we center more care in everything that we do?

Moya Bailey

02:55

Oh, I love that. And that is such a design question because I think there's an assumption that care always lands positively. So I wonder if you could say a bit about your design background? And how design got you to care? Or do you feel like those two things are separate?

Miya Osaki

03:15

I've been a designer for over 15 years. I studied human-centered design. I feel very lucky to have been in the early days of exploring what that meant to actually do deep research in a participatory way. And that got me into healthcare. I ended up working at Johnson and Johnson's design office in 2006, to look at the role of design in health care experiences. So I probably also defaulted to care being a positive thing, just in my early days of working in health care systems. And the longer you work in systems you realize that they're not so healthy. There is a lot of care that needs to go into making a system healthy. It's related to my work in social innovation now, which is really to look at systems and understand how they work. Who's involved, who's not involved? Where are they supportive for people? And where are they lacking or even carrying along oppression and trauma?

Moya Bailey

04:20

Yes. That's just a lovely segue into this question about your work as Chair and how social innovation is part of the work that you're doing in the academy. Can you say a bit about your program and how social innovation is key to that?

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