In the May Community call, we talk about all things conference presentation proposals! The Civic Design Call for Presentation (CFP) will be open for submissions until June 1 to present at the conference on November 16th – 18th, 2022.
About our guests:
Rachael Dietkus is a designer, licensed clinical social worker, and certified trauma professional dedicated to trauma-responsive practices in design. She is the founder and principal social worker-design of Social Workers Who Design and works with design teams worldwide.
After a 10-year career working with social justice and human rights non-profits, she earned her MSW in 2010. Rachael worked at Veterans Affairs for nearly seven years, followed by several years in higher education. She has served as an AmeriCorps member, an NGO delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council. She is currently a Governor-appointed statewide Commissioner with the Serve Illinois Commission on Volunteerism and Community Service.
In 2022, Rachael will be finishing her MFA in Design for Responsible Innovation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on how and why trauma-responsive methods are relevant and needed in design research and practice.
Victor Udoewa
Having started his career in the design and development of computational tools for scientific applications, Victor shifted his focus to the social impact space and Information and Communications Technologies for Development, both community and international development. He is a practitioner and advocate of participatory design, a meta-methodology he’s used in service and system design for governments, multilateral institutions, nonprofits, for-profits, and communities, to facilitate skill-building and improved employment opportunities for community members. Bitten by the “civic-innovation bug” he is now focused on creating or improving government products and services for citizens, immigrants, and refugees.
Victor has a particular love for design, learning, and design education. He advocates bringing practices such as positive deviance, pluriversal methods, and systems practice into civic design. He helps leads an equity-centered meetup group and Justice by Design as part of his work to decolonize design. Outside of work you can find Victor teaching salsa, singing with his a cappella group, volunteering as a health trauma and crisis counselor, or (mostly) hanging out with his family.
Jennifer Strickland is a Senior Human Centered Design, Accessibility Engineer. With a non-traditional path to design and more than 25 years of professional experience in a variety of mediums, Jennifer led product teams and served in nearly every role in the product life cycle. With an intersectional, non-binary identity of a multi-racial ethnicity and invisible disabilities, they experience a lot of exclusion. Prioritizing inclusion, Jennifer aims to ensure no one is excluded from products and services from the beginning. Inclusion as culture, not a feature to be backlogged.
Additionally, Jennifer is an invited expert with the W3C, serves on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group, finalizing WCAG 2.2, drafting WCAG 3.0, and a co-lead of the Structured Content sub-group. They volunteer with a number of organizations such as the U.S. Digital Response, AIGA DC (2021 DotGov Programming Director, IxDA DC (organizer), UXPA DC, and speak on inclusion, accessibility, web performance, and CSS at a variety of events. Jennifer was a speaker for the inaugural Rosenfeld Media Civic Design Conference in December 2021.
