Lee-Sean Huang

Lee-Sean Huang is a designer and futurist. He teaches at the Parsons School of Design at The New School and works as the creative director of Foossa, a consultancy that helps organizations build more inclusive and resilient futures through storytelling, service design, and community engagement. He is interested in the intersection of design and democracy and exploring the role of participation and play in the future of work, education, health, and civic engagement. He has worked with organizations ranging from Fortune 500 companies to the United Nations and has appeared in the New York Times, Fast Company, TIME, and Entrepreneur.

Lee-Sean Huang is the cofounder and creative director of Foossa, a community-centered design consultancy. As a designer, strategist, and storyteller, he collaborates with communities and organizations across the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia to solve social innovation challenges.

His work ranges from redesigning the experience of employee health and wellness at a Fortune 500 corporation to helping agencies of the United Nations better manage their institutional knowledge and refresh their public stories in changing times. He has taught senior organizers of the SEIU (Service Employees International Union) ways to rethink labor organizing in a networked age, advised a major social network on the multiple and shifting meanings of friendship, and conducted research supported by the European Union to build tools to scale online citizen debate and deliberation.

Lee-Sean's career in designing participation and building movements began when he was a student at Harvard, where he studied Government and engaged as a community organizer and human rights activist. He later honed his campaigning and organizing skills running online-centered campaigns for Avaaz and Human Rights Watch. Prior to co-founding Foossa, Lee-Sean was the founding member of the design team at Purpose, a public-benefit consultancy that builds movements and new power models to tackle the world's biggest problems.

Lee-Sean regularly teaches and writes about community-centered design and social innovation. He is a faculty member at the MFA Design for Social Innovation Program at the School of Visual Arts. He regularly gives workshops and keynotes on community-centered design and social innovation at conferences around the world and at universities including Cornell, the New School, New York University, the College of Staten Island, UCLA, and the University of Hawai’i. He has written for publications including GOOD Magazine, Fast Company, and the Huffington Post. He contributed to Wisdom Hackers, an anthology of essays by artists, activists and entrepreneurs published by The Pigeonhole in 2014 that explored deep questions of contemporary life. He was also co-author of the political science debate textbook Freedom Vs. Security: The Struggle For Balance published by Central European University Press in 2009.

In addition to a bachelor's degree in Government from Harvard, Lee-Sean holds a masters degree from ITP, the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. He currently serves as president of the ITP alumni association. He also serves as a founding trustee and treasurer of the Awesome Foundation New York, an international network of donors who give micro-grants to forward the cause of awesome in the universe and volunteers as webmaster of the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program Alumni Association of New York (JETAANY). He also teaches and trains capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art disguised as a dance, at the New York Capoeira Center.