erin SuSki
Designing with curiosity, empathy, and impact.
As a designer, I’m passionate about creating thoughtful, user-centered solutions that are functional, inclusive, and visually engaging. Each project highlights my process — from research and collaboration to prototyping and final execution — with a focus on solving real-world challenges through design.
Spring 2024
In my second semester as a Product Design student at the University of Minnesota, the opportunity arose to collaborate with representatives from a Kansas City–based cycling group who shared valuable insights into the experiences of children of color learning to bike. During user interviews, a recurring challenge surfaced: traditional helmets often fail to accommodate larger hairstyles or textured hair, creating both safety concerns and barriers to entry.
Inspired by these findings, the focus shifted toward designing a helmet solution for adult riders. The result was a modular, tectonic plate–style helmet that adjusts to fit a range of hairstyles, featuring increased cutouts for greater airflow and styling flexibility. The lack of vibrant options on the market was also addressed through the design of a colorful prototype (affectionately dubbed the “Watermelon Helmet”), celebrating self-expression and inclusivity.
Fall 2023
Racism Untaught was a class focused on identifying systemic and corporate racism in our day-to-day lives and how to combat it in practical ways. The process book summarizes the research, ideation, prototyping, and implementation the group undertook. The task was divided among the group, with my portion being to design the book layout and infographics. Each student had to present the same criteria, including research and subsequent findings, a prototype, and a personal conclusion. Our group focused on the urban use of various installations as hostile architecture meant to deter houseless people from loitering in certain areas and how this disproportionately affects lower-income people of color.
Spring 2025
For a semester-long project in a Service Design class, birth preparedness and opportunities for service redesign in maternal healthcare became the focus of exploration. A slideshow case study was developed to document the full research process - from early user interviews to identifying a key problem area and proposing a solution. Along the way, user journeys were mapped, stakeholders were engaged, and system-wide implications were considered to ground the design in real-world possibilities.
Fall 2023
In the first semester of graduate school, we were tasked with taking an intensive deep dive into a systematic redesign of a partial website called Rubble. The initial creation of this website was to support a small group who’s intention was to connect local DIY-ers and small builders to leftover, yet still usable, building material. It was our task to flesh out the unfinished website into a full-fledged, research-based, and viable site.
Spring 2024
A part of our Quantitative Research Methods course required us to create a hypothetical research question, find two related published studies to utilize as supporting research, and create a hypothetical and proposed study based on our initial thesis statement. In the end, we produced both a short research paper, hypothetical data results, and a complementary research poster to present our “findings” in class. The idea of cross-disciplenary learning appealed to me as a teaching assistant of a class that followed this approach, so I structured my thesis statement and research around such.
Fall 2024
For the final project in Computer-Aided Design 1: Solid Modeling and Rendering, the challenge was to design a three-part toy small enough to fit within the dimensions of a Kinder Egg Surprise. With the holidays approaching, a dreidel with gelt took shape: a two-part shell designed to securely nest around five pieces of gelt. After modeling the design in SolidWorks, the prototype was 3D-printed with carefully refined dimensions to ensure a perfect fit inside the Kinder Egg capsule.