Employee Spotlight: Rizwana Hussain, Principal Service Designer

Tell us a little about your background and experience

My parents grew up in a rural village in Pakistan. My grandparents were farmers. My mum has stories of nearly being stung by scorpions when making cow dung patties to burn as fuel.

My mum and dad both learned how to grow and make things. They knew how to cultivate the land naturally (without chemical fertiliser), how to use nature as medicine (ayurvedic practices), and how to survive in a place with limited electricity, water, food and money.

When my parents moved to England, they continued some of these practices. They grew, nurtured and made things from scratch. Growing up, we had chickens in the garden, they later became our dinner. My parents planted fruit trees, grew vegetables and still continue to grow fresh vegetables and herbs.

How did you get into service design?

I grew up in a house where things were hand-crafted, repaired or created from scratch. My sister would sew our clothes, furniture covers and even curtains. From food to clothes to home repairs, I was surrounded by makers. Because of this, I used to love creating and making things when I was young. This drew me into design and is why I studied graphic design at university.

I worked as a graphic and visual designer for a few years. I found that people made decisions based on personal preference, rather than evidence and I was working on projects that weren’t aligned with my values. I was caught in capitalism and pushing products onto people that they didn’t really need. That didn’t sit well with me.

This helped me realise that I love designing things, but I don’t want to work on anything that uses people’s insecurities to make a profit. Or suggests that people need products to make them feel good about themselves. I learned what I care about and where I’d like to focus my working life.

What I care about

• Not selling things to people that they don’t need
• Having a good reason for a design decision
• Working on things that have a systemic impact

This led me to Hyper Island, a digital creative business school, where I did a Masters in innovation and design thinking and then moved into Service design. I love design research and learning about human behaviour. I find that I get to use my creative and analytical brain at the same time and enjoy the challenge of communicating complex things in a simple way.

Why this job?

I joined cxpartners because of the company’s mission and social values. Especially within Financial Services:

Our mission is to help people make better financial decisions –  by designing simple, easy-to-understand financial products and services.

What are your career ambitions?

I grew up with little money, but a savvy dad that had an entrepreneurial mindset. He showed me the value of hard work. But, I also saw that no matter how hard you work, sometimes life is easier for people when they’re born into more privileged circumstances.

This made me want to focus on balancing the wealth inequality gap. So my personal mission is to redesign Financial Services to nurture financial wellbeing. Because there’s got to be a better and fairer way to share the wealth in the world. It astounds me that in a world of plenty, people struggle to access essential services like food, shelter, electricity and healthcare because of lack of money.

Where would you want to progress next?

I would love to work in policy. Problems like social and wealth inequality are messy, complicated and systemic. We need to tackle them from different angles using a systems thinking approach. I want to work in financial policy and find ways to improve/redesign our financial system to support people’s financial and mental wellbeing.