How to Find Purpose in a Design Career - Lauren Serota

In Chapter 6 of 18 in her 2011 Capture Your Flag interview with host Erik Michielsen, interaction designer and researcher Lauren Serota discusses where she finds purpose in her career. Specifically, through her social sciences background and design research, Serota finds purpose learning to make things for people.  As a practicing designer, she notes product design - interaction, fashion, graphic, etc. - is about value added utility.
To identify this utility, she draws upon social science experience in anthropology, sociology in qualitative marketing research across cultures. This informs the resulting product design efforts. Serota is an interaction designer at frog design - http://frogdesign.com - and a professor at the Austin Center for Design - http://ac4d.com . She earned her bachelors degree in industrial design from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).