Hello. This is Kate.

I am Kate McEntee, a social design researcher and strategist.

I am passionate about learning from people. I seek to design for human awareness and social connection. My strength is taking on difficult to understand subject matters and making them understandable and applicable. My work creates tangible outcomes: communication for understanding like this, opportunities for engagement like this and this, and strategies for action like this.

ISIS:
Examining the Unthinkable
“ISIS: Infrastructure of Fear and Belonging” is an independent research and multimedia piece I developed for the exhibition Furnishing the Cloud. The show requested projects that creatively interrogated the media and “infrastructures” that permeate and affect our lived environments and experiences. Each submission required a glossary and design that would help people “see” the concept of infrastructure in a novel, informed way.

ISIS is an infrastructure that took shape at the center of the world’s attention, and yet many people—from media to politicians to terrorism and religious experts—were at a loss to understand the growth and popularity of such an extreme and violent group. The glossary I developed attempted to offer a deeper understanding of ISIS—how it came into existence and spread, the underlying motivating ideologies, and its influence on the surrounding world—while avoiding distractingly dramatic imagery or misleading terminology.

What I Loved
This work provided me the opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of current events in Syria and the ISIS phenomena, a rare chance to use my background in Islamic Studies and the space to indulge my personal interests in Middle Eastern politics and Arab culture.

Team Members
Independent project, drawings done by Ina Lim