David Jelke, EDI '23Design Research, Service Design, Healthcare
About
David has always been interested in the sequence of data, communication, and behavior, and its tangled array of feedback loops. He sees design as the method for unplugging and reconfiguring bundles of different inputs in this three-node machine. The human-centered component of design ensures that all this work concretely improves the lives of people, while also giving the designer an essential sense of purpose. More practically, David thinks design is the most cohesive framework to instill the mindsets one needs to be successful: compassion, unobstructed creativity, play, iteration, failure resistance, optimism, openness, and storytelling.
David hopes to use his experience with EDI to explore healthcare and interaction design. He is chiefly interested in how technology use intersects with wellbeing, and also how to incorporate more play into people's lives. Outside of work, David loves hip-hop, running, movies, and meditation.
Portfolio
Why EDI?
David discovered human-centered design by accident his senior year of college because he needed an applied science distribution to graduate. The course called into question his decision to go to medical school and made him wonder about other, more collaborative ways of problem-solving in healthcare. Upon graduating, David devised a way to test-run different career paths by embarking on a series of short internships. The notes he took along the way all pointed to his thriving in work that was collaborative, creative, and rooted in a greater purpose.
David loves human-centered design because it embeds a sense of kinship and stable compassionate response into the design process. He specifically chose EDI because of its small cohort size, which makes it all the easier to stamp that sense of community into his work. He was also encouraged by the reliable presence of other psychology and medicine-minded students in the program.
Education
BA, pre-med, Neuroscience, Dartmouth College
Experience
Director of innovation, Ignite Mental Health; reporter, Broadband Breakfast; SEO marketer, Voyij.
