Who Am I?
Riley is the first to make sure everyone is included, so when presented with the idea that chairs can be made more ergonomically and should accommodate different people in her freshman year intro to engineering design course, she knew she needed to create inclusively in her designs.
During her BS in Mechanical Engineering at Penn State, she explored a variety of work for human variability, including an extensively researched thesis focusing on human anthropometric data analysis and accommodation factors in airplane seating. She further explored the intersection between accommodation and safety for individuals during her internship at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in the Center for Injury Research and Prevention.
These experiences have culminated in a daily passion for creating accommodating human-occupied spaces for all. Beyond ensuring that her work helps real people, she has the engineering background to bring her solutions to life. Riley is driven by creating work that exists in the real world, helping real people, leaving the world a bit safer and more accessible for everyone.
In her spare time, you can find her at the gym, cooking up a fun new recipe, or listening to her favorite music just a little bit too loudly.
Designing beyond the status quo.
The first time I read “Invisible Women” by Catherine Criado Perez, I felt pissed off. This book goes into so many different examples of how the world is designed for men, from phones to crosswalks, but what stood out to me the most is that women are 17% more likely to die in a car crash than men. By nature, we’re considered to be “out of position drivers.” Later in college, I took a graduate-level class on designing for human variability, where I found out that it was a stature problem and how so many human-occupied spaces have levels of disproportionate disaccommodation for certain populations based on anthropometry.
This frustration led to passion; my spark for designing for not just people, but all people using something was officially ignited. As a mechanical engineer, I knew how to physically create things and had taken engineering design classes, learning about the importance of designing for people, but this was something tangible, right there in front of me, just waiting to be fixed. I wrote my thesis on analyzing different factors in airline seating that lead to different levels of accommodation and comfort for passengers. I worked on a research team at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia where I brought my own passion for designing for human variability to my role working on the redesign of an occupant compartment for automotive safety testing. And now, as a masters student in Northwestern’s EDI program, I hope to design solutions that use people as the metric for products and spaces. Creating inclusivity in designs is my why in design; no one should be invisible.
In the least Miss America-esque way possible, I want to make the world just a little better than I found it.