Product Design & Civic Tech
McKinsey & Company | MIT Media Lab
// Hello, World!
I’m a Design Director at McKinsey & Company where I specialize in product design and new digital business builds for Fortune 500 companies. I’ve spent the past 7 years working across the entire product development lifecycle taking products from zero to launch. Notably, I’ve successfully launched a mobile app valued in the multi-billion-dollar range and 3 multi-million-dollar native and web apps in international markets. In addition to product builds, I work with clients to build out their design teams and orgs, implement design ops, and manage senior stakeholders to influence design’s role in the larger organization(s).
The products I’ve designed range from digital websites / app, to service design experiences, to spatial and physical product design. I work across the end-to-end product lifecycle - from facilitating high-stakes ideation workshops with C-Suites, to synthesizing ethnographic insights into design principles, to building design systems and prototypes, to taking products to markets and in the hands of users, and working iteratively with key stakeholders to refine the future-state roadmap and designs based on user feedback. I draw from my background in human-computer interaction, design ethnography and civic technology to design humanity-centered experiences. My hope is to design digital, physical, and spatial experiences to build a more empathetic and compassionate future.
In my previous life, I worked in the fields of design, anthropology, and emerging technology (e.g., generative and conversational AI). I received my M.Sc from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT Media Lab, Center for Civic Media where I built technologies as interventions towards new speculative futures for our relationships with emerging AI technologies, privacy, and surveillance. For more on hacking Alexa, Google and Siri, see here. Prior to this, I worked in UX design, tech consulting, and international development. For writing, explore here.
When I’m not prototyping, you can find me working on a new mixtape, scaling a rock wall, hiking a mountain, tucked away reading poetry, or simply sitting and watching the world go by. For more life explorations, go here.
Expertise
Design is the art of creative problem-solving. I use design as a medium to develop technologies that promise a more meaningfully connected world, build products that remind us of our humanity and creativity, and create immersive experiences that challenge us to expand our moral universe – to critically design and prototype alternate future(s) of a world we want to live in.
Skillsets: Product Design / UX Design / Interaction Design / Service Design / Workshop Facilitation / Figma / Creative Programming / Sketch / Ableton / Touch Designer / Arduino / Rhino
Interests: Speculative Design / Spatial Design / Civic Tech / Design Justice / Inclusive Design Publications
Reynolds-Cuéllar, P., and Chong Lu Ming, R. (2020) Coffee Farms as Design Labs: Manifesting Equity x Design Principles in Practice, in Boess, S., Cheung, M. and Cain, R. (eds.), Synergy - DRS International Conference 2020, 11-14 August. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2020.387
Chong Lu Ming, R. (2020). Hacking voice assistants: Speculative design as resistance in the age of surveillance capitalism (Master’s thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology). https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/129274