Khanh Nguyen

khanh nguyen is an interdisciplinary designer & researcher seeking empathetic ways to understand, provoke, and solve the world’s most pressing issues. With a background in mechanical engineering and human-centred design from MIT and two years of experience working in strategy, she wears many hats.

A first-generation vietnamese-american immigrant, she finds this identity core to her, as it allows her to bring in hybrid perspectives and switch between vastly different cultures. She is both suspicious of and beholden to the institutions that have shaped her, aware that she has insight to both underrepresented voices and privileged spaces. Having lived and worked in the Bay Area, New York City, Milan, Kuala Lumpur, Boston, and London, her background and experiences bring a deeper degree of empathy to all that she creates.

She considers herself a creative technologist, marketing mixologist, yes-and activist, and kaleidoscopic strategist. Remember her in cmyk, and get the full spectrum of colour.

Here's the story behind this photo: the entire time I was creating my prior project, I had this crawling hand injury. I went to nine different medical appointments, where I had to explain the story of my pain to a different nurse or doctor each time and advocate for myself when they didn't believe me. I did receive meticulous care by the end (and the injury is now healed), but only after I had to go through the exhausting process of corroborating my own medical history. That is with pain that is physical and visible.

I have a constant muscle knot in my back, which leads to chronic pain and fatigue. I've always dismissed this as not something to bring to a doctor. Yet if knots persist for longer than three months, they may be classed as myofascial pain syndrome, MPS. So why did I feel like my pain was something I should diminish?

Persisting MPS may cause fibromyalgia, a chronic muscle pain condition that most healthcare practitioners still struggle to understand. In parallel, endometriosis, a chronic pain condition caused by uterus lining growing elsewhere, is often dismissed as "just normal period pain." (Should there be such a thing as "normal" pain?) These both invisible illnesses that primarily affect women.

My practice is mixed media design and research. Inspired by shibari, meditation, and the bodily, tactile feeling of rope and thread, I have created artefacts and narratives to explore the cultural and medical journey of women in pain and provoke conversations and further interventions.