is a multidisciplinary designer driven by sense-making, storytelling, and curiosity, exploring experiential narratives, spatial computing, and creative tech
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Ann Li
Neurobiologist-turned designer. Currently pursuing a Masters in Interaction Design at Carnegie Mellon University, devoted to ways of savoring and supporting everyday flourishing through design.
Work spans the digital and physical, including multisensory exhibit spaces and activations, creative direction and strategy, interactive participatory installations, and user interfaces.
3M Internship
Roles
Design Research Ethnography Storytelling Interaction Design Design Thinking + Facilitation
In the summer of 2022 I joined the Insights to Innovation (i2i) team at 3M as a DesignResearch intern. i2i is a nimble internal innovation unit comprised of strategists, futurists, researchers, coaches, and facilitators that drive human-centered new platform exploration and development. By leveraging trends & foresight, design thinking, and lean startup mindsets & toolsets, our team confronts ambiguity and change, explores new opportunity spaces, and pursues global transformationalinnovation. Due to confidentiality agreements, I'm not able to share details of my work at 3M, but high-level contributions are as follows.
The 2023 intern cohort
Contributions
Interactive communication of innovation platforms
During my internship, I had the opportunity to immerse in diverse domains encompassing 3M's global healthcare, home improvement and care, consumer healthcare, and personal safety divisions. Living at the intersection of design, research, facilitation, and business strategy, I spearheaded a project focused on designing interactive storytelling experiences to bring clarity to complex information, and strategic communication of novel platform opportunities. This involved synthesizing complex qualitative research to weave together expansive bodies of work, to convey and inspire exploration of macro trend opportunity spaces.
Exploratory workshop and research support
As the only Design Research intern, I collaborated with other teams across the company to provide support and help define research phases. In particular, work on the heuristic review of an internal scheduling app helped that business team make better decisions regarding the scope of work that lay ahead of them.
I supported the design, facilitation, and documentation of workshops across multidisciplinary teams. Highlights included designing and facilitating a workshop to help representatives from various divisions re-envision the Future of Healthcare, live-sketching and visual mapping to clarify and create a mutual point of reference.
Design thinking and leadership
I also led an end-to-end design thinking project addressing stigma and barriers to caring for aging skin. I helped ensure continued focus on the most salient aspects of the project, driving ideation, concept development, and project management amongst a diverse intern cohort.
Reflections
My time at 3M has been an invaluable experience in wrangling ambiguity and complexity. I'm constantly amazed at the range of subjects I've found myself fascinated by, and have been lucky to feed that curiosity on the job.
