Maureen Macharia is an accomplished Product Designer, entrepreneur, and community builder who is proficient at the intersection of design thinking, technology, and entrepreneurship. In her work, Macharia combines her analytical skill and human-centered approach to solve problems that identify needs and opportunities for company growth. Macharia develops practical and contextually prominent products or solutions for the market.
As a Nairobi-based designer, Macharia is keen to champion Africa’s development in the field of innovation, design & technology. She dedicates her practice to help businesses and organizations shape the future of Africa’s technology and focus on empowering the youth. Macharia believes the essentiality of flourishing youth development and capacity building for Africa is to focus on growing design talent and communities. She founded one of the biggest design conferences in Africa, UxP, Nairobi’s inaugural annual design conference that gathers all design and business communities to discuss the essence of a design-driven approach to innovation.
Additionally, as an entrepreneur, Macharia is the founder of Spindle Design, a design-driven studio that brings together a multidisciplinary team of designers, developers, business strategists, and data professionals to build new products and services. Her provisional leadership drives the team to move forward with the principle of marrying human centricity and business conventions to capture and deliver unique value to pressing challenges across Africa.
Recently, in response to COVID-19, Macharia talked about the critical role of being a designer in a crisis. “Does design fit into shaping a post-crisis world? The short answer, without a shadow of a doubt in my mind: yes,” she stated at the UX South Africa, a virtual conference centered around the topics of designing for today, tomorrow, and beyond. Despite the many hardships of the COVID-19 pandemic, Macharia believes it has opened opportunities for designers to get creative and develop new solutions, new collaborations, and new avenues for partnership. She addressed the need for designers to be responsible for a crisis like COVID-19 and urges designers to be adaptive and agile by learning and seizing the opportunity. “Don’t waste the crisis. Don’t waste your skills. It’s an opportunity to tap into a number of the challenges we see,” she stated.
Bibliography
Macharia, M. “[Event] UxP - The Nairobi UX & Product Design Conference.” Medium, Nairobi Design Community (NDC), 16 May 2019, medium.com/nairobi-design-community/event-uxp-the-nairobi-ux-product-design-conference-6751ea575d3b.
Macharia, M. “Maureen Macharia’s Schedule for Black Women in STEM 2.0 Summit 2019.” Maureen Macharia, bwistem2019.sched.com/speaker/maureen_macharia.1u77ksq6.
Macharia, M. “Maureen Macharia.” TechWomen, www.techwomen.org/impact-story/maureen-macharia-2.
Macharia, M. “Spindle Design: Spindle Design.” Spindle Design | Spindle Design, spindledesign.co/.
Perhaps we will have jobs to encounter pandemic crisis of world in the future.
Wow, it’s really interesting to hear UX Design Stories coming out of Africa! It so happens that I’ve been watching some of these videos on YouTube that pops into my Recommendations about the rise of the tech industry, there.