Get to know the AIGA Boston board this week! We are featuring Chiranit Prateepasen. She is the President of the AIGA Boston. She’s facilitated events like Unconscious Bias: EXPOSED, International Women’s Day: Equality in Tech, Using Behavioral Design for Good, and so much more.

Who are you?

I’m Chiranit Prateepasen, an avid learner and a doer, curious by nature, and love to solve problems. Human quirks fascinate me. I enjoy observing people and trying to make things that improve lives.

What do you do for a living and where do you do it?

I’m a lead User Experience Designer for a marketing automation application. What that means is that I design applications for people who are involved in the business of connecting with their customers. We use intelligence to help our users create a frictionless personalized experience because the best experience is centered around the individual’s needs and wants.

What inspires you to do this kind of work?

An opportunity to understand how to turn mounds and mounds of data into something meaningful for the customers. Our work is at the intersection of Design Thinking and Machine Learning.

How long have you been in the field?

I started as a graphic designer in 1995 and got into designing for the web in 1998. I moved into the experience design world after I joined Continuum in 2003. I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to practice human-centered design and use it as a strategic tool for innovation.

Why did you get involved with AIGA? Why should someone become a member?

I’ve had great mentors along the way and I know how important it is to keep learning and supporting each other. I found AIGA and the Boston chapter welcoming. I enjoyed going to AIGA events and had a few ideas for events I thought would be interesting. I volunteered to help and was eventually invited to join the Boston board.

What advice would you give your past self?

To question the question. To speak up more and never apologize for asking a “stupid question” because hesitation has a way of preventing one from learning and a team from functioning at a high level.

Describe your creative process. What are the major steps?

Meet the people you’ll be designing for. In an ideal situation, I would do that first. Learn from them through observations and interviews. Then, analyze and synthesize what you learned into meaningful insights that fuel your designs. Prototype your designs and meet the people again to test your ideas. Take what you heard and iterate your design. Basically, the process repeats as the product gets refined. You never stop learning and improving – and that’s what excites me.

Anything else?

It’s very important for us to mix with different groups of people. The world is multi-cultural. You need teams that are multi-disciplinary but they also need to be multi-cultural, representing different ways of seeing the world. You probably have seen products that made you wonder what the design team was thinking because they missed something that seems obvious. Don’t let inclusion just be a matter of your company’s policy. Do that yourself. Reach out to someone that doesn’t look like you.

You can check out Chiranit’s work here

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