Designer Statement
Catherine Lim draws from her background working in community economic development to inform her approach to design. Her graduate work has focused on communicating, provoking, or intervening in issues of social and economic justice. She values collaboration with community partners and has most recently worked with undocumented immigration activists and a local community senior center, where she conducted her thesis work exploring participatory design with older adults. She has also worked as a design researcher on studies aiming to support chronic illness care and improve access to nutritious food in childcare settings.
Visit Catherine’s website
“Catherine Lim is one of the most exciting graduate students I have ever had the pleasure to work with. She is brilliant, talented, hardworking, and sociable, and approaches her work from a place of deep commitment and passion. Over the past several years, it has been exhilarating to watch her take on and master a wide variety of new skills, including visual design, interaction design, ethnographic research, academic writing, programming, and electronics. Working with her on funded research projects has been a revelation, as she has consistently brought high levels of creativity and critical thinking to notoriously difficult problems in healthcare and child nutrition. At the same time, the projects that she has initiated both in and outside of class has been consistently excellent, winning national design competitions and garnering the respect of her faculty and peers. As her teacher and advisor, I appreciate her dedication, her integrity, her insight, and her good humor. Catherine has a knack for challenging longstanding assumptions and defying expectations in deep and fundamental ways, but always with humility and good cheer. Working with her has made me a better teacher.”
– Tad Hirsch, Assistant Professor of Interaction Design
Committee
- Tad Hirsch (Interaction Design)
- Kristine Matthews (Visual Communication Design)
- Nancy Hooyman (School of Social Work)