Michid Byambajav, Conservation + Innovation ’24: “Human-centered design teaches empathy”

On the cost of sustainability, growing from rejection, and learning from the people around you

Spending her childhood and adolescence between Ireland and Mongolia, Michid Byambajav was exposed to two very different environments from a young age. One developing and one developed, the countries differed both in their environmental impact and their capacity for sustainability. With that in mind, Michid came to Berkeley hoping to better understand the economics of conservation and the actionable change one person, or even one country, can make. Rather than just learn about it, however, she joined the Fung Fellowship to put that knowledge to use.

This is her story.

What interests you about conservation?

Growing up between Ireland and Mongolia provided me with a unique perspective on environmental issues and disparities. Mongolia is a developing country with a heavy reliance on resource extraction so mining is a significant industry with substantial environmental impacts. The climate makes it so that families have to burn coal to survive the harsh winters, which causes pollution that leads to respiratory diseases. On the flip side, Ireland has a highly-developed knowledge economy, and their most popular industries are service, pharmaceuticals, and tech.

Witnessing the differences between the two countries piqued my interest in sustainability and conservation and encouraged me to learn more about it!

Why did you apply to the Fung Fellowship?

Coming to Berkeley, I was introduced to human-centered design (HCD) by my classes and my design club, Berkeley Innovation. I found this type of design to be super fun, and loved applying it to different use cases. I was looking to apply it towards sustainability, so when I came across the Fung Fellowship, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to combine my two passions!

How would you describe human-centered design and what do you enjoy about it?

HCD is an iterative problem-solving approach consisting of four steps — research, synthesis, ideation and prototyping — that places a lot of emphasis on trying to understand the user and their needs, so co-creation is key.

I love how HCD teaches empathy, as it pushes one to really understand the problem at hand by talking to, interacting with, and observing the user.

It is often applied to product design and development, however, it can be applied to basically any other discipline. In the case of the Fung Fellowship, it’s applied to conservation.

How were you first introduced to human-centered design and how have you applied it since?

I was introduced to HCD when I was passing by a Berkeley Innovation end-of-semester showcase where they showed all the design projects that they had been working on for the semester. Before this point, I had always assumed design involved making things pretty or designing graphics so, as someone with zero artistic inclinations, I had never even considered it.

The showcase made me realize that that wasn’t the case; design, and by extension human-centered design, is much more approachable and doable than I had realized. This kind of design takes more of a creative problem-solving approach. The projects at the showcase applied HCD to solve problems in a variety of industries, such as entertainment, finance, and tech. I got super excited and applied the following semester.

I unfortunately got rejected after a four-round application process (Berkeley club culture is actually insane… It’s harder to get into a club than to get some jobs), but I was able to take an applied HCD course — Equitable Design with Mathieu Aguesse — where I learned and grew a lot. I reapplied to Berkeley Innovation fall semester of my junior year and was accepted.

Subsequently, through BI, I worked on a project with sustainability startup Community Gearbox to encourage borrowing and lending behavior and a project with Pinterest. I also found some of my closest friends at Cal here! Additionally, I co-instructed a Human-Centered Design DeCal course with my friends from my club, which was a super rewarding experience as I got to lecture every week and test my knowledge in front of a class of 60 students.

How did your Fung Fellowship project combine human-centered design and sustainability?

We worked on a pretty cool project with Planet Labs, a satellite data company — and the Fung Fellowship’s first for-profit partner — during my second semester in the fellowship. The scope was open-ended which was a little bit difficult to navigate at first, but we chose to work with harmful algal blooms.

Harmful algal blooms (HABs) are excessive algae growth in bodies of water that release dangerous toxins into the water and can have negative impacts on organisms when ingested, inhaled, or touched. HABs are predicted to become more and more frequent in the future due to climate change.

Through our research and interviews, we realized that a lot of issues surrounding HABs were due to lack of public knowledge, rather than research/technical constraints, so our project focused on communicating information about HABs to the public. Our project won the Fung Fellowship Future Forward Innovation Award which was awesome, and I’m so grateful for my team for all of their hard work!

The fellowship gave us a general overview of HCD and conservation issues, but it really helped that I and others in the team had prior HCD and product management experience, and others had some in-depth environmental science, engineering, and policy experience coming from different disciplines.

Now that you’ve graduated, what part of the fellowship will you look back on most fondly?

This may sound super corny but I’m super grateful for the people I’ve met. I’ve learned so much from everyone in the fellowship, but especially my teammates Kelly, Tia, Bella, Shannon, and Ryan! It was super inspiring to see how much time and effort they put into the project, how our different skills complemented each other, and how we came together to work on this project.

They are all so awesome at what they do, and it was super cool to get a glimpse of different fields and perspectives through their expertise. I’m super super grateful to have been able to work with such amazing people!

Additionally, I’m also glad to have been able to get a glimpse of what sustainability looks like in industry and in the tech world to determine whether it’s actually what I want to pursue in the future.

What kind of impact do you want to have on the world?

A positive one for sure, I’m not 100% sure what that looks like at the moment, but it’s something I definitely keep in mind when making decisions about my future.

Do you have any advice for future fellows?

Get to know everyone else!! Also, you really get out what you put into it.

Fun fact or favorite quote:

Maybe it’s because I just recently graduated and am feeling super sentimental, but I’ve really been feeling:

“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened” :)

Connect with Michid.

Edited by Veronica Roseborough, Fung Institute Digital Marketing Intern.