Alumni Innovator Spotlight: Julienne Ho (SC ’23)

This month, we are highlighting 5C alumni innovator Julienne Ho, who graduated from Scripps in 2023 with a self-designed major in Engineering and Design. Throughout Julienne’s engineering education at the Claremont Colleges, she saw an overwhelming trend: technologies were developed with only a small subset of people in mind. From car crash experiments to medical devices and the built environment, engineering often marginalizes the people new technologies are meant to serve. The Hive was a turning point in Julienne’s education, introducing her to inclusive design methodologies that center human experiences and empower engineers to create solutions that help rather than hurt.

Julienne incorporated human-centered design into her engineering major, centering user interviews, ethnography, and empathy in engineering processes. Her interdisciplinary thesis, informed by needfinding techniques learned through HCD, involved communication design for a Mars Sample Return mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

After graduating, Julienne joined Ecosystem, a consulting firm in NYC focused on adapting built environments to be more sustainable and user-friendly by cutting carbon emissions and retrofitting spaces to better suit users’ needs. Her interdisciplinary major helps her communicate with both building users and building operators, enabling her to capture the insights needed to create truly inclusive designs. She recently finished redesigning a library at a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, aligning the space with both sustainability and user needs.

Julienne believes that projects brought to life through participatory research, user engagement, and inclusive design–the same principles she engaged with at the Hive– are the projects that positively reshape the places people live, work, and learn within.

Julienne welcomes requests to talk about her work, job hunting, academic planning, or anything else. Contact her on LinkedIn or her website julienneho.com!