Kim Erwin is a visiting professor at the Institute of Design. For the past 15 years, she has been a practicing design planner specializing in the translation and communication of research insights into strategic direction. Working with clients like Allstate, Walmart, Purina and Church & Dwight most recently, she has watched the field of user research mature and expand from its early technology planning roots into the preferred consumer insight methodology across industries and organizations.

Kim's passion is for the most information-intensive aspects of design practice—in particular the conversion of user research and secondary research into stories and frameworks that designers and business leaders can use as a basis for action.

She focuses on developing new data experience and presentation methods to help clients come into emotional, as well as intellectual, contact with important data.

She pays particular attention to the shift in preferences toward on-demand, time-effective, random-access information seeking and delivery to which we as a culture are habituating. How can communication design accelerate research uptake in organizations? How might it deepen the connection between clients and consumers? How might thoughtfully-crafted data experiences generate lasting empathy for consumers and purposeful action inside organizations? These are all areas where design practices are manifestly more effective than conventional business practices. Formalizing this as a new area of practice, and therefore study and development, is Kim’s enduring interest.