Maurice Cherry and Stesha Doku: Changemaking Designers

Maurice Cherry is principal and creative director at Lunch, an award-winning multidisciplinary creative studio he established in 2008 in Atlanta, GA. Currently, he works as the creative strategist for CodeSandbox.  Maurice is perhaps most well-known for his award-winning podcast Revision Path™, which showcases Black designers, developers, and digital creators from all over the world. It is the first podcast to be added to the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Other projects of Maurice’s include the Black Weblog Awards, 28 Days of the Web, The Year of Tea, and the design anthology RECOGNIZE.

Maurice is the 2018 recipient of the Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary from AIGA, was named as one of GDUSA’s “People to Watch” in 2018, and was included in the 2018 edition of The Root 100 (#60), their annual list of the most influential African-Americans ages 25 to 45. 

You can find Maurice on Twitter @mauricecherry

Maurice's 2015 Lecture: Where Are the Black Designers?

Stesha Doku, MD is a private practice anesthesiologist, web designer and developer based in Greensboro, NC. She focuses on designing interfaces for healthcare technology for software healthcare providers use to better take care of patients. She believes recognizing design's role in healthcare will help build a better future for growth and quality in the medical field. 

What we particularly need more of in medicine are designers who can be a bridge to create great interfaces that physicians and healthcare professionals can integrate into their practice. While I believe that anyone can program given a computer, patience and the right book, learning what works on the front-end for different industries is much harder. Only good design can be the connector to helping us meet our goal of making technology adoption worthwhile and cost effective in medicine!

Stesha Doku MD on Revision Path 01 July 2013
Mastering the craft of great design is a surprisingly long and continuous process. You will find that having a good eye is very different than being able to think creatively, which is in turn very different from being able to technically manifest your ideas digitally. Great designers have all three, so pick one to start with and the others will build on that.

 
You can find Stesha on Twitter at @dohkoo.