Student Profile | Claudia Hopkins
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On February 26, the fourth year Interaction Design student will share her hope for health care with more than 400 attendees at Health Talks, an annual speaker series.
On February 26, fourth year Interaction Design student Claudia Hopkins will share her hope for health care with more than 400 attendees at , an annual speaker series.
She won the Health Talks Student Content, which invites any BC student to submit an entry for the opportunity to be one of eight Health Talks speakers. Claudia鈥檚 articulated the 鈥渓ove story鈥 between health care and service design.
In addition to wrapping up her second degree at Emily Carr, Claudia works with UBC Continuing Professional Development as an Instructional Designer.
How did you end up studying Interaction Design? Was it always something you wanted to do?
I received a chemical biology degree from McMaster University, but I wanted to do visual science communication. So I came to Emily Carr work on my illustration skills, and I fell in love with design during my Foundation year.
I like science from a zoomed out perspective, where you can see the results, but in research you鈥檙e very zoomed in and working at a micro-level.
And what does Interaction Design entail?
Broadly, it鈥檚 using technology to connect people. That can include websites and apps, but also designing processes, systems and environments. And everything is technology - even a piece of paper is a way to connect.
It can be confusing because a lot of the jobs interaction designers apply for fall under the umbrella of 鈥減roduct design,鈥 which was traditionally thought of as industrial design, but the definition of what a product is has changed so much.
Some people in my cohort are creating digital products and websites, which is more traditional interaction design, but other students are designing installations and doing design research projects.
How did you get interested in service design? In your Health Talks essay you mention its not very well known in Canada.
I was initially a Communication Design major, and in one class we had to write about a problem and how we would approach it using design. The design intervention I described wasn鈥檛 really COMMD, it was service design and my instructor encouraged me to research service design. But it鈥檚 hard to read about s