The Story of Design
Stories are the way that people can make sense of reality. In cognitive behavioural conceptions about how people understand the world, experience is reduced to stimulus, interpretation, and response.
Hello! I’m Stephen Bau. I am a UX Designer based in Vancouver, Canada.
I am exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together. I founded Builders Collective to build leaders to design a resilient society. I write about the evolution of design at stephenbau.com. I work as a mentor for UX Academy at Designlab.
You can find me on Behance, Codepen, DEV, Dribbble, Flickr, freeCodeCamp, GitHub, Glitch, LinkedIn, Instagram, Medium, Pinterest, Stack Overflow, and Twitter.
Recent Work
Design for the human experience: perception, cognition, emotion, and action
What I Do
Social and participatory design for transformational change
Identity Design
An ongoing and iterative process of exploring why you exist, what you offer, and how you deliver value to build long-term relationships of trust.
Experience Design
A cross-disciplinary approach to creating products, services, and experiences that are desirable (human), feasible (technology), and viable (business).
Service Design
Improve – or revolutionize – the products and services you offer. Change the way your teams work as they adopt a more hands-on and human-centered approach – building success for your organization.
Social Design
A critical discipline that challenges the pure market-orientedness of conventional design practice, and attempts to see past this into a more inclusive conception of design, in which user groups who are marginalized are also given priority.
Testimonials
A passionate advocate for creative collaboration
Stephen has been a valuable and trusted colleague for many years at Domain7, and has brought a unique combination of design and technical skills to our team over this time. He’s pushed himself and as a result us, as a team, to better understand the potential of a standards-based open web.
I don’t know anybody else who plants a flag for innovation and puts as much strength and might into it as you. You have influenced us as a team immensely. Your ability to go into stealth-mode and create solutions from the ground-up and release them to the company...and have them perfectly documented...that’s a gift. Thank you so much for your calm-yet-fierce brilliance, for the steady force of innovation that you insisted on bringing to every project.
Stephen is an incredibly talented designer and a meticulous developer. His design skills have been honed over the years he has spent crafting visual identities and he truly understands what it is to work with challenging clients. He is a gifted illustrator, a typographic fanatic, a responsive design guru and a champion of delightful user experiences. His skills as a developer inform his designs and make him an expert in interactive design. His understanding of industry best practise is unparalleled and his commitment to ethical standards make him an asset to any team.
I’m not speaking in hyperbole when I say this: I have not met anyone that more earnestly, passionately and courageously mines the depths of systems as you. This is a quality that I personally (and I’m sure I’m speaking for a lot of other designers and developers within Domain7) have found truly inspiring. You bring a sense of care, thoughtfulness and world purpose to all your work that is unparalleled, and I know those qualities have and will have a major influence on how we at Domain7 do what what we do for many years to come.
Blog
The changelog of an agent of change
The Big Picture
We are concerned with the minutiae, especially as our roles within the process become much more specialized. My question has often been, who is thinking about the big picture?
Contact
Explore how we can imagine, design, and build the future together