It's nice to meet you.

I am a designer. I build businesses, products and projects that drive impact. Currently:

I’m a product advisor to GoodDollar, a global UBI project.
I consult with Quantified.ai, who apply decades of deep communications subject-matter expertise and emerging tech to innovate in sales and communication coaching.
I’m a co-founder and advisor to Funga, a public-benefit corporation restoring the forest soil mycobiome for climate impact.
I teach how to use design-attributed practices for commercial and public impact at UT Austin’s Center for Integrated Design.
I run a small cosmetics company with a cult following.

I work in emerging markets, emerging technologies, and forward-leaning applications of design methods. I produce artifacts and facilitate conversations to support companies in making strategic decisions on how they run, the products they make, and how they make them.

Past Work:

I was an Entrepreneur in Residence with Climate Collective, where I explored how emerging tech can accelerate just climate impact. I co-chaired a World Economic Forum working group on the use of digital technology to better facilitate ecological asset markets. I was a co-founder and the design director of the Crypto Research & Design Lab (CRADL) before it merged with the Crypto Council for Innovation. CRADL was formed to take took a deep look at the potential social impact (+/-) of web3 tech. From 2017-2020 I built the Product, Customer Experience, and UX practices at Yoma Bank, a commercial bank in Myanmar. Prior, I brought private sector best practices to the public sector with Bloomberg’s Government Innovation’s Innovation Teams program. I have led projects with Studio D Radiodurans, including many partnering with world-renowned social enterprise Proximity Designs. I sometimes collaborate with the talented folks at Formation to understand how people experience environments. I have worked closely with a handful of technology startups throughout their 0-1 and scale-up journey, including Smarter Sorting, a platform that reduces municipal hazardous household waste incineration through diversion, reuse and up-cycling and Impact Terra, a crop intelligence and agricultural insights platform. I was, not long ago, an interaction designer-then-associate director at frog, where I also acted as design research leadership for the Austin studio. I'm a member of the founding faculty at the Austin Center for Design.

I'm most often in Austin, Kauai, Yangon and NYC.

Please, say hi:

lauren@appropriate.design
@serota

Press, Talks, Etc:

Payments for Ecosystem Services - A primer on PES, common pain points, and the promise of digital technology was published! Climate Collective commissioned this work, which I authored alongside Julian Granados.

ReFi NYC invited us to talk about the GoodCollective project and platform.

GoodDollar’s CTO Hadar Rottenburg and I wrote about the interoperable solution design and open-source proof of concept we developed for GoodCollective, a platform for Conservation Basic Income. The article breaks down the design of the platform (including a novel use of NFTs), and why it serves as an example of the interoperability, transparency, and scale possible when multiple partners build on public blockchains with common standards.

Recommendations for the Digital Voluntary and Regulated Carbon Markets, a WEF whitepaper I co-authored, was published in March 2023.

On behalf of Climate Collective, I attended the first World Bank and Chatham House convening on Green Accountability.

We debuted GoodCollective, a global platform linking direct payments to climate action, at GoodTechFest and were joined by partners Savimbo and Silvi.

At CoinDesk’s 2022 Consensus Conference, I facilitated panels with organizations applying Web3 concepts and distributed ledger tech to address issues of Environmental Well-being and Financial Health.

Colin and I talked about the forest microbiome and climate impact with our friends at Farm.

Please read Tricia Wang’s take on “How Might We” as a sharp example of design concepts being misappropriated

Doreen Lorenzo and I chatted on design research and impact for her column in Fast Company.

Our work on Paddy to Plate featured in Design for Social Innovation: Case Studies from Around the World

Mark Fonteijn and I talked about the new shape of designers on his Service Design Show.

A Case Study on (and an award given to) my team at Yoma Bank’s all-digital credit scoring and distribution product, SMART Credit.

A mention (alongside other greats like Erik Hershman & Robert Fabricant) in Jon Kolko’s 2018 piece for Interactions Magazine on The Divisiveness of Design Thinking.

CGAP released their fantastic Customer Centric Guide. Their Voice of the Customer toolkit features work the team and I did with Wave Money in 2017.

I spoke on the human side of fintech at Myanmar’s Ministry of Commerce (UMFCCI), hosted by LEARN, DICA and Manchester Metropolitan University’s Fintech program.

Very cool profile on the Los Angeles i-team, and their work over the past few years improving the city via innovation practices.

Apparently I make a few appearances in this David Sherwin piece in Smashing Mag on user research, from 2013.

Wired on our work in Saudi: What every company gets wrong about developing for the emerging world, and how to do it right.