Kate Sellen

ksellen@ocadu.ca
Professor, Tenured
Faculty of Design

I am a Professor of Design in the Faculty of Design at OCADU and Canada Research Chair in Health Design (Tier 2). I lead the Health Design Studio at OCAD U which I founded in 2018 and was the inaugural director of the Health Design Master’s Program at OCADU in 2016. I spent my early career as an interaction designer leading design research, digital strategy, and interaction design in the private sector. I now work on bringing an inclusive and interdisciplinary design approach to healthcare design challenges. Much of my work focuses on design for emergency medicine and on high sensitivity topics, including the dosing, ordering, tapering, and management of opiates, communication at end of life, and public health communication in urgent situations. Part of my research considers how different types of truth and knowledge inform the work I am engaged in, how different experiences of health and wellbeing might come together through participatory and inclusive design research processes, and how designed objects, interactions, and experiences can be personally relevant, community relevant, and evidence based. I bring an interdisciplinary approach to projects and engage both in more formalized quantitative methods and arts-based methods such as installation. My overall agenda includes supporting design orientated change in healthcare more broadly through collaboration, joint projects, and knowledge sharing. She previously held positions at University of Toronto’s Technology for Ageing Gracefully Lab, Knowledge Media Design Institute, and AT&T.