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Meet the Class of 2017: Kohzy, Paola, and Ruth

Meet the 18 students who will make up the Class of 2017. Over the next few weeks, we’ll highlight three incoming students. Today: Kohzy, Paola, and Ruth.


meet the class of 2017 kohzy paola and ruth 1

Kohzy Koh

Growing up in Singapore, a country renowned for its efficiency, it’s no wonder Kohzy’s first love is cities, especially the ones where people are ever-moving and things are ever-happening. He is fascinated by everything that makes a city tick: from its creative communities to its waste management systems. As cities everywhere swell with more people, more diversity, and more issues, Kohzy can’t wait to be involved in creating products or services to make urban life better and more sustainable.

The path to IxD has been meandering for Kohzy. Graduating with an Economics degree from Harvard and heading straight into finance, he found himself more fascinated by products and business models than by the numbers of transactions. He never forgot the exhilaration of creating things in college, be it architectural models, newspaper cartoons, or theater sets. He quickly dived into the tech industry, doing everything from operations to marketing to design for a startup in NYC. In the months before embarking on the IxD program, Kohzy bought a bicycle and cycled across Scandinavia, bringing back memories of perfectly-crafted furniture, lush green fields, and a renewed conviction that the best way to experience a city is astride a bicycle.

Paola Rangel

Paola is an experienced visual designer, front-end developer, and UX designer. She has studied graphic design in Colombia and design management in Argentina.

Paola is excited to learn a new set of skills and use them to support communities through design and entrepreneurial projects.

She also loves science!

Ruth Tupe

Ruth has always had an insatiable curiosity to understand the world around her, deciphering its patterns and uncovering common themes between seemingly disparate subjects. Her curious nature has not only led to her endless list of interests, but it’s also responsible for her multi-faceted design work. Always looking to break traditional boundaries, Ruth has evolved from a graphic/web designer to a true multi-disciplinarian, by constantly applying design thinking in different fields such as open-source technology, social innovation, and organizational design.

Hailing from Toronto, Canada, Ruth has a background in business, design, and technology. She studied Graphic Communications Management and graduated with a Bachelor of Technology from Ryerson University. Being able to draw knowledge from different disciplines, Ruth was immersed into interaction design during her foray with wearable technology. She spent two years building large-scale interactive exhibitions in public spaces. Most notably, she led a team to build open source wearable technology for ALS patients. The technology was featured in Toronto’s Nuit Blanche and the TIFF Nexus Conference in 2011. Upon graduation, she worked at a web and mobile product startup, applying design thinking in organizational design and education. She is also active in Toronto’s hackathon scene; incubating new ideas and collaborating with designers, developers, and DIYers.

Ruth hopes to push her creative boundaries at SVA by exploring the application of interaction design in social innovation. As a politically minded designer, her goal is to use design not only to craft meaningful experiences but to ultimately help find solutions to real-world problems.      

Ruth’s wide array of interests also makes her the ultimate hobbyist—she loves coffee, music, sports, traveling, sci-fi novels, and watching copious amounts of period dramas.

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