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Be part of StartupSeattle’s design project this summer!

OED's StartupSeattle team working on a project. This is a guest post from our StartupSeattle intern, Mulki Mohamed. 

I am currently an undergraduate student at the University of Washington’s Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) program, and interning for the summer with the Office of Economic Development’s Startup Advocate, David Harris. In addition to running the StartupSeattle program, David is also a recent graduate of the HCDE Masters program at the University of Washington. We are excited to be working on a User Experience Design project for OED’s StartupSeattle program, which focuses on connecting Seattle’s tech startup founders and investors to information and resources.

The design challenge for this project is to uncover how we might use the City’s website to better connect tech startup founders and investors with information and resources. During my summer internship, I’ll be conducting research, ideation, prototyping, and the evaluation phases of the project, and plan to document our process via StartupSeattle’s Twitter and Facebook.

After researching Seattle’s startup ecosystem, as well as meeting with local founders and investors, we have learned some interesting insights. For instance, we found that identity, whether racial, gender, or other aspects, can be a help or a hindrance in a founder’s journey.

Our goal is to not only share what we’re learning, but to also engage in dialogue with our followers about their experiences as well.

Starting this month, we’ll be launching a few ongoing conversations on our social media platforms as a part of this project. We hope that by sharing the information that we discover, we can invite others to the discussion as well.

If you’d like to learn more about Seattle’s tech startup community, or you have things you’d like to share, then this is something you won’t want to miss! We want to hear your ideas on how we can improve so make sure to follow StartupSeattle on Twitter and Facebook to get the latest updates on the project.