Gretchen Chern | Design Research & Strategy

Ethnographic Study of Art Supply Buying Habits

Overview The pur­pose of this study was to exam­ine the habits of dorm-dwelling stu­dents in search of art/design sup­plies in order to under­stand how impor­tant loca­tion is in rela­tion to price and oth­er con­trib­u­tors to the idea of val­ue. We explored oppor­tu­ni­ties that one store in Savan­nah may have in over­com­ing the dis­ad­van­tage of prox­im­i­ty […]

Recycling in Savannah

How to Moti­vate Peo­ple to Cre­ate Bet­ter Recy­cling Habits through Aware­ness, Edu­ca­tion and Con­ve­nience Overview For my final project in the Design Man­age­ment pro­gram at SCAD, I want­ed to take a clos­er look at recy­cling in Savan­nah, GA. The pur­pose of my study was to reveal a bet­ter way to encour­age and enable recy­cling for […]

Building a New Brand

Set­ting the Foun­da­tion With my back­ground in Graph­ic Design, I have designed visu­al iden­ti­ties for exist­ing brands, but I’ve nev­er had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to devel­op the frame­work for a new brand from the ground up. At SCAD, I was able to work with five oth­er stu­dents from dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines in a spon­sored col­lab­o­ra­tive design class […]

What’s Under the Kitchen Sink?

Overview In the twen­­ty-first cen­tury, orga­nized liv­ing spaces are more preva­lent than ever. Orga­ni­za­tional sys­tems have been designed and redesigned in an attempt to make spaces more accom­mo­dat­ing. The scope for this project was to step back and ana­lyze why cur­rent sys­tems are not work­ing to their full poten­tial and cre­ate a solu­tion that would […]

The Human Factor: Design Thinking

This intro­duc­to­ry class helped me under­stand the phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al human fac­tors that need to be con­sid­ered with every design project — from ergonom­ics and usabil­i­ty to light­ing and col­or. Com­ing from a graph­ic design back­ground, the phys­i­cal fac­tors were espe­cial­ly new to me. I learned how to find and use anthro­po­met­ric data as well […]