About Mari Nakano

Mari Nakano is a designer, systems strategist, coach, and educator who has been practicing what design can do for products, services, and teams in the social impact space for over 15 years. They are currently focused on building a practice centered around relationship and community-building, food justice, sustainability, and planetary repair; spending part of their time as an adjunct faculty and thesis advisor here at DSI. 

Mari served for 5 years as the Design Director at the NYC Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity (NYCO), where they built strategies to help scale design thinking and strengthen community engagement and participatory research practices across the City. They led NYCO’s Service Design Studio Team, which aims to build up the capacity of government colleagues who are focused on tackling issues around poverty and inequity to understand and apply service design methodologies to improve services, programs, and processes through evidence-based, user-centered, and creative approaches.