Design practice leadership

I had the opportunity to start and build a human centered practice within the technology organization of a Fortune 500 food company. My hands and mind have been in every part, from introducing a design framework to writing role descriptions, conducting research and creating prototypes to mentoring and building exercises to empower our team.

In less than 3 years, our team:

• Researched and designed solutions in over 36 projects across the enterprise impacting tens of millions of dollars and a variety of end users, including hourly team members, top executives, external customers, farmers, and truck drivers.

• Created and publicized the first internal design system to help streamline and accelerate design and development by:

  • aligning and extending branding as needed

  • creating templates, processes, and frameworks, such as estimating effort in a shared service model and moving from challenge to a research plan

  • designing reusable purpose-defined UI components

• Hosted regular teaching sessions and open design reviews to demystify and democratize what design does and how it can be leveraged and multiplied our presence

Strategic Design

From my experience in Fortune 50 high-tech and Fortune 500 professional services companies, I have research and strategic project use cases that include but are not limited to:

• Stakeholder workshops, research, and design for a unique mobile and packaging experience to help less meat-savvy grocery customers become more “kitchen confident” with new meat cuts (Patent US 11468487 B2)

• Product design for a novel event app feature, allowing tech event users to more easily find sessions and demos relevant to AI-defined topics (Patent US 15305248 B2)

• Desktop and mobile app design for executive leadership quickly understand and align on the state of the enterprise across business units

• Mobile app design for senior company leaders to quickly understand key reputation-based social commentary and take meaningful action

• Internal tech platform analysis and proposal to increase global MarCom organization and collaboration

• Global social media strategy design to social-specific standards, an internal governance and support network, and a market-aligned social presence

• Process design for better long-term management of design libraries and project files for Figma-based design teams

MyPass with The City of Austin

How might we help people experiencing homelessness in Austin store, secure, validate, and share key personal documents to better access critical services to recovery…and how might blockchain play a part?

As the Service Designer for the MyPass project, I worked with a team led out of the Office of Innovation with social services, EMT, health services, and lived experience representatives to design an answer to this question and prove out the need and viability of using blockchain. I conducted user research and created clickable prototypes, created materials to explain the project, wrote proofs for blockchain need, assisted in grant writing, and helped plan and coordinate a blockchain hackathon that brought together our mayor, health and social service leadership, the blockchain community, IBM’s head of design, and people in our community experiencing homelessness.

Final concept | Systemic reuse to reduce

Borrowed Good, a new third-party service provides metal flatware to provide to restaurants at low-cost subscription for takeout use, with deposit bins in convenient locations, such as transit entries and community hubs. Borrowed Good picks up, washes, and redistributes the metalware to be used again. Utensils sourced are donations and marked to be in the system.

Next step is to launch a full pilot; check out the live site and join in the project with your feedback!

Concept & prototype testing

To test my concept to close the utensil consumption cycle and provide reusable metal utensils, I have brought it out in part to the north shore Chicago community. My primary question is, presented with the option, will users choose the metal utensils? Secondarily, will they return them? Utilizing a messaging bot for user communication and wonderful, like-minded establishments to test, I am hoping to answer these questions and uncover additional insight.

Design research summary

Plastic is a problem. "How might we delightfully reduce single-use utensils amongst US urbanites?" This is the challenge I am exploring as my master's capstone in the Strategic Design & Management program at Parsons at The New School. Part One–Design Thinking Research–will be part of a four booklet set with the completion of the program in May 2018. Download a free PDF of the first booklet by clicking the button below.

SXSW Interactive business cards | Recommendation system + graphic design

During SXSW, you have an opportunity to meet highly interesting and intelligent people from all over to world. As an Austin native, I decided to integrate the question I get most — "What do you recommend?" — into a purposeful first impression, creating a system of business cards, a Google map with specific locations, and a page with overall tips.

Note | Social media analysis and visualization

How might you synthesize social media and visualize it in a new way? What if you introduced senses beyond just sight?

What began as an exercise to reimagine social media data from an event turned into a prototype for a new type of "live music."

Creative Warmup | Javascript + exercise

Everyone is creative. Strengthening your ability to generate ideas and look at problems from a variety of perspectives and degrees of practicality can be very useful, no matter your age or career subject.

Take ten minutes and random items you'd find in your junk drawer or office desk and stretch your mind!

It's Love. Remixed | Javascript + game

Love can be so cliche.

This game remixes chart-topping love songs of the 90s with cliches of today. What's love got to do with it? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Test out the game concept and play a round or two!

Tutorials | Boolean logic for data exploration

Most Boolean logic tutorials out there are geared to engineers and dry. To a digital marketer, this can seem scary, but learning the skill is increasingly useful in writing digital listening queries and quickly mining mentions. In creating this tutorial, I focused on making it fun, visual, and appropriate for this audience.