Irina
Wang

Master's Candidate, Rhode Island School of Design

Irina Wang grew up as a first-generation Floridian with Taiwanese parents. She lived in the UK while completing her undergraduate studies and working for two years at renowned London design studio Pentagram. Upon graduating from University of the Arts London, Chelsea College of Arts, in 2015, she was granted the Mead Fellowship for continuing design work for endangered languages. In January 2018 she moved from England to New England, where she is currently obtaining a master’s in industrial design at Rhode Island School of Design. Irina has a soft spot for leavened bread, existentialist jokes, her old Bianchi bike, campfire smell, and the printed word. She attempts to dabble in far too many things, but believes that design can be a wide-angle lens to view—and change—the vast and varied world.

I’m most excited to work on projects that… address important global issues with a balance of gravitas and playfulness.

I’m looking for partners that can help me… contextualize problems from an expert’s perspective when designing within unfamiliar industries and professional circles.

A moment when I felt most inspired in my work was… designing educational materials for an endangered language in the politically oppressed Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh—a project at the intersection of my interests in typography, linguistics, literature, and anthropology. It changed my perception of the designer’s role and potential in addressing broken systems.

Innovations in my field I’m most excited to work on… will inevitably require a transdisciplinary process and navigating the ethics of humanitarian design.

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