julkaalmquist@gmail.com

Julka Almquist is a researcher, designer, and educator based in Minneapolis.

I hold a PhD at the intersection of anthropology and design from the University of California, Irvine, and have spent my career exploring how people create meaning, navigate complexity, and find beauty and connection in everyday life. My work has spanned design research and innovation leadership at IDEO, the Mayo Clinic, Target, and through independent consulting and creative practice.

My research draws on ethnography, participatory design, and mixed methods to understand human experience and inform strategy, products, services, and organizations. I have led research and innovation initiatives across industries including healthcare, finance, retail, public libraries, consumer products, and the cultural sector. Alongside this work, I have taught design research, human-centered design, and client-based studio courses at ArtCenter College of Design and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where mentoring emerging designers and researchers has been one of the most rewarding parts of my practice.

Alongside my research, my creative work extends into making spaces and publications where ideas can be encountered and shared. I host gatherings organized around books, conversation, and hospitality, exploring how aesthetic experience can deepen our relationships with one another and with place. I am the founder of Aino Press, an independent publishing company dedicated to overlooked works on aesthetics, culture, nature, and design. Its inaugural publication, the first English translation of Beauty for All by Ellen Key, will be released later this year.

What is the future of public libraries? On this project, I worked as a design researcher and strategic advisor, exploring the future of public libraries through human-centered design. Starting with public libraries in Chicago and Aarhus, Denmark, the project soon grew into a network of global collaborations leading to meaningful change and developing new practices around creativity and experimentation in libraries. We worked with librarians to understand patron needs, what it means to embrace failure, and how to do live iterative prototyping in your library. This work culminated in a co-authored IDEO Design Thinking for Libraries Toolkit that is free to download. It has been translated into 16 languages by generous librarians around the world who were inspired to share the toolkit with colleagues across their countries and communities. 

How can we deepen the exchange of stories between immigrants and their new neighbors? I explored this question with Green Card Voices (GCV), a Minneapolis-based mixed-media nonprofit organization that builds bridges among immigrants and their communities through the art of storytelling. GCV invited me to design a card game that would allow diverse groups to exchange stories in person and to learn from each other. Through co-creation with the community and the GCV team, we made Story Stitch a card game that is structured to support equitable conversations across lines of difference. The project took off when Alexandria Ocasio Cortez posted the cards on her Instagram, sharing how she used them with her team. GCV has sold tens of thousand of copies of Story Stitch and built a facilitation infrastructure around the tool.

How do people care for plants? I led the research and concept direction on a project with an organics company and large gardening company to explore possibilities for indoor gardening and to better understand how people care for their plants. Through research in Chicago, Portland, and New York, we found a critical insight: people who were incredibly good at caring for their plants didn’t have more knowledge about them, but they paid more individual attention to them. We had hypothesized that people needed more information and knowledge, but through the research we learned that what people really needed was to learn how to pay attention to their plants. We shifted our focus toward a growing system that invited a different quality of relationship between a person and what they're growing. This project influenced new growing systems and growing tools.

How can schools be more equitable and better prepare students for the world we live in? Education is going through a radical transformation that requires new approaches and forms of inquiry. I collaborated with Transcend Education to build creative capacity to transform schools and systems through a series of convenings, long-term mentoring, and the development of new tools. Using human-centered design methods, we worked with educators to co-create thinking activities and tools to guide inspiration and bring new visions for school designs and learning systems. As one example of a tool, I created the first iteration of their Design for Learning Cards.

How can retail make zero waste practices easier for people? What responsibility do mass retailers have in creating a more sustainable future? Target has a new sustainability strategy where they have committed “to co-create an equitable and regenerative future together with guests, partners, and communities.” At Target, I worked on a team to actualize this strategy by developing a consumer-facing experience that offered products, services, and education to make it easier to adopt sustainable practices and shop sustainably. I led the design research for the development of Adding up to Zero, a sustainability experience at Target’s Open House Retail Lab.

How can we explore big complex questions in poetic and transformational ways? How can we see the world in new ways? Over the course of my research career, I have discovered that people love to learn through first-hand analogous explorations because it expands their worlds in unexpected ways. Through many of my research projects, I organize inspiration field experiences that are a form of intervention to change how you see a problem and even the world. They challenge what we see every day, encourage having fresh eyes, and form a renewed connection to experience-based learning. You can see examples of these field experiences in Aarhus and Berlin.

I am the founder of Aino Press, a small publishing company focused on overlooked and dormant works on aesthetics, culture, nature, and design. Through this project, I also host in-person Reading Rooms (which are living bibliographies of our books in process), and host other community events.