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I’m a human-centered design and behavioral design advisor, focused on climate.
 
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I use design to help solve some of our planet’s big problems by–

 
 

1 Helping product leaders apply design thinking to their strategies

2 Helping companies + orgs build thriving design teams and culture

3 Teaching ethical design to the next generation of designers

 
 
Working together
 

We may be a good fit if…

  • You're creating something to help people or the planet (a product, program, experience, campaign, behavioral intervention) and want to understand your users and create your design strategy.

  • You're a small product team and could use help with design process, prioritization, and mentorship.

  • You’re a non-tech org and want to learn best practices in UX/behavioral design/agile thinking.

  • You need to build a design team or hire a design firm and want help to define, recruit and evaluate.

I’m not currently available for work.

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I won’t be helpful if…

  • You need an experienced hands-on UX/UI or visual designer to create deliverables or embed into your product team. This isn't me anymore, but I may know of talented designers to refer to you.

 
Selected speaking and writing
 

TEDx
Using Design to Influence Behavior

Conference

Climate Design: What Really Works

Article

How Designers
Can Fight
Climate Change

Article

IxDA
The Behavioral Age: A Designer’s Primer

Conference

Behavioral Hacks
to Get Us to
Eat Less Meat

Article

Opower’s Secret Weapon for Cutting Energy Usage

Podcast

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Selected clients
 
 
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Testimonials
 
Deena is brilliant. But more importantly, she’s able to share that wisdom with others in an approachable, actionable, and down-to-earth way. My team appreciated her guidance and candor, and was able to put her insights to work for our organization right away. She navigated our disparate levels of skill and skepticism effectively and with ease.
— Erin Simpson, Civic Hall Labs
The insights that came out of Deena’s research were nuanced and deepened our learnings. She has a great sense of both strategy and execution—she not only produced compelling insights, but provided us actual outputs that we could use as templates for our work moving forward.
— Christie George, New Media Ventures
Deena was an incredible manager and strategic design leader at Opower. As a manager she was a great advocate for me and did a great job unblocking our team so we could focus on doing great design work– we called her our forcefield. Deena built and maintained an amazing design team, from 3 to 30+ designers, researchers, writers, and front-end developers. It remains the best team I have ever been a part of.
— Suelyn Yu, Google
 
Get in touch
 

Note: I’m not able to do informational interviews right now. If you’re a designer looking to transition into the climate space, wonderful, we need you! Here are some resources.