ISABELLE LEE
Multidisciplinary Designer &  Strategist


→ Currently
At the Harvard University Graduate School of Design  
A Design Researcher at the MIT AgeLab
Member of the 2025-26 Climate Leaders at Harvard University

→ Previously
Architectural Designer turned Creative Strategist.

Shaped by radical speculation at Cook Haffner (Peter Cook, Archigram), ecological rigor at Henning Larsen, social impact at TEN-Arquitectos, and experiential storytelling at Rockwell Group. I bring a multi-lens strategic lens to complex, human-centered design challenges.

Imaginative spirit cultivated at the Rhode Island School of Design


About
CV
Work
Case Studies
The Field
004
Home Futures: Adaptive Systems for A Warming World
Project Location

Cambridge, MA

Brief
The workshop draws from multiple design disciplines; including service design, behavioral design, and speculative design to transform the home into a design canvas. Participants work through a structured, hands-on process using tactile design tools, climate scenario cards, and guided reflection exercises developed with The MIT AgeLab researchers to prototype interaction concepts, support systems, and service logics that respond to both environmental conditions and human needs in a time of crisis.
Timeline
On-Going
Collaborators
The MIT AgeLab
The MIT Morningside Academy for Design
Sheng-Hung Lee, PhD

Background

Design Goals

 The Challenge

 Older adults aging in place are increasingly exposed to climate-related indoor risks, often without clear signals, trusted guidance, or reliable support at home. Many risks emerge gradually through heat, air quality, or disrupted routines. This makes them easy to miss and difficult to act on in time.

The Missing Middle


Between climate forecasting and crisis response lies a missing middle: routine-based, human-scaled interventions that blend physical artifacts, services, and light-touch technologies to help older adults anticipate risk, maintain daily life, and respond with confidence during climate stress.
The Impact

The toolkit equips designers, researchers, and practitioners to move from abstract climate risk to concrete, routine-based interventions. By framing resilience through everyday scenarios, it supports the rapid generation of concepts that can be iterated, prototyped, and later evaluated with older adults aging in place.
The System

This toolkit is designed as a guided prototyping system that translates climate risk into designable building blocks.

Participants move from scenario immersion to routine mapping to concept assembly using function cards and tangible tiles. The toolkit supports teams rapidly construct, critique, and refine interventions that support resilience through everyday life.                            





User Persona
Ground design decisions in lived constraints, not assumptions.
Persona cards define health considerations, mobility, tech comfort, household composition, and support networks so teams design for real capability, anxiety thresholds, and care dynamics.



Home Canvas
Make resilience spatial and routine-based.
The home template anchors ideas in the physical choreography of daily life, helping teams locate friction points (sleep, cooking, bathing, entry/exit) and map where climate stress concentrates indoors.

Design Goals &  2x2 Experience Mapping
Translate climate stress into a clear design intent and interactions.

Guides participants from problem definition to design intent by linking user pain points to intervention goals and experience principles.


Climate Scenario Cards
Turn climate hazards into designable moments.
Scenario cards simulate realistic stress conditions (heatwaves, smoke events, outages, flooding) to pressure-test how routines break down and what kinds of support are needed before, during, and after disruption.
Instruction / Prompt Cards
Guide teams through a repeatable sprint.
Prompts structure the workshop flow, reduce ambiguity, and keep groups aligned on the same sequence of thinking.
Function Cards
Convert scenarios into functional requirements.

These cards define the functional roles an intervention can play in the home, helping teams combine and evaluate solutions as integrated systems of support.


Tangible Tiles
Translate abstract ideas into concrete, everyday touchpoints.

These tiles help teams locate where resilience can live in the home by using familiar objects as starting points for product innovation, service touchpoints, and low-friction interventions during climate stress.



Workshop Arc

Design Journey

 Collaborative Brainstorming

Toolkit In Action

Co-Creation Workshop

Through a participatory framework, we brought together an interdisciplinary cohort of 10 participants to collaboratively create future inventions that enhance an older adult’s resilience to climate stressors.


UI/UX DESIGN + COMPUTER SCIENCE STUDENT PARTICIPANTS

Multi-Disciplinary Pairs
We structured the workshop around multidisciplinary pairs to accelerate synthesis across domains. Pairing participants with different expertise helped teams move beyond single-discipline solutions and surface tradeoffs early.


NEUROSCIENCE + ML/SOFTWARE ENGINEERING PARTICIPANTS



Catalogue of Inventions*

* [on-going, check back for more!]
* [visualizations made by the researcher based on the participant’s prototypes]



AI Assisted Medication & Hydration Reminder System

“A smartwatch that detects when her body temperature is too high, and environmental sensors connect to her medication device [...] the device itself is the hub to remind her to hydrate, or take a cold shower.”

Solar Powered Automated Blind System

“At night when its hot, her joints hurt, and she can’t get up to open the window. In the afternoon, the system harvests solar energy, instead of solid doors, shutter doors and blinds adjust when indoor temperatures become too high.”

An Ambient Mini Fridge

“The kitchen seems to be the hottest place, it might cause her to not want to cook or get water. The bedroom is kind of far from the kitchen too, she might not be able to walk there in her condition.”








Re-Arranging the Furniture, Featuring a Cooling Couch

“By making her primary living room more comfortable even during a hot day, we thought cooling materials for the couch can help with overheating [...] we also thought about silk sheets...”


Insights



Learnings
Scenario Led Empathy

Climate stress becomes actionable when it is experienced as a lived moment.

Using climate scenario cards and a home context canvas, participants moved beyond abstract “resilience” and into specific breakdown points in daily life. Function Tradeoffs as a Design Tool

 Strong concepts start with clear priorities, not more features.

Function cards helped teams translate scenarios into a ranked set of support needs and make explicit tradeoffs early. This created sharper concept direction, aligned multidisciplinary teams on what mattered most, and produced more coherent interventions Tangible + Visual Thinking (Design Doing)


Physical prompts and mapping boards accelerated alignment and idea generation across disciplines. The physical board enabled participants to move fluidly between modalities, shifting from reflection to mapping to making while keeping ideas visible.


Next Steps

Run additional dyad sessions

Continue the workshop with at least 10 more multidisciplinary pairs to broaden concept coverage and surface repeatable patterns across scenarios.
Pilot with older adults through AgeLab partners

Test the toolkit with older adults aging in place via MIT AgeLab and community partners to validate assumptions, refine prompts, and calibrate trust and accessibility requirements. Translate 1-2 concepts into real prototypes

Select the most promising intervention directions and prototype them at low-to-medium fidelity, then run iterative in-home or simulated-environment testing to refine feasibility, maintenance burden, and adoption fit.
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