Mari Nakano focuses on shaping how design functions and adds value in multi-disciplinary government and non-governmental spaces. She currently serves as the Design Director at the NYC Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity (NYCO), where her role is to build strategies to help scale design thinking, cross-collaborative and community engagement practices across the City. She leads NYCO’s Service Design Studio Team, which aims to build up the capacity of government colleagues who are focused on tackling issues around poverty and inequity to understand and apply service design methodologies to improve services, programs and processes through evidence-based, user-centered and creative approaches. Prior to this role, she served as the Design Lead for UNICEF’s Office of Innovation, and focused on building a team of designers to support data scientists, engineers and country program officers to build innovative solutions for children and families around the globe. Mari holds an M.F.A. in Media Design Practices from ArtCenter College of Design, and a B.A. in Asian American Studies and minor in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles.