2024/05/17
I attended the R&D Product and Innovation conference where I first heard of Blink during Ben Shown’s talk on building a product North Star. As someone who has been working on new products and interfaces for 10 years, I really related to the idea of creating different types of “North Stars” to convince different stakeholders, communicate solutions, and have a stable reference for people to point to during development. So many of the projects I’ve done over the years, whether company projects or personal ones, have required me to boil an idea down to its most compelling parts and delivering that core idea. My current augmented reality project, MIX, is definitely an example of a “Trojan Horse” style North Star where I am hoping to show just what’s possible by building out a solution to one core use case for augmented reality art.
The examples Ben showed of the type of work that is happening at Blink really excited me. The case study in making data more usable and useful with NASA was especially interesting as so much of my recent work and research has been in finding ways to move users closer to data while removing cognitive load and keeping simple information architectures.
I have been an engineer and manager of design and engineering teams at Hive AI since 2014, and I am beginning my MSc in System Design and Management this fall at MIT. I have a passion for understanding how to distill complex systems into usable interfaces that are both seamless and joyful. When Ben mentioned that Blink is also located right down the street from me in Inman Square, it really solidified for me that Blink would be a great place to contribute to interesting projects and work with a team that cares about building compelling user experiences like I do.
I joined Hive AI in 2014 as the third employee, and have been an engineer and manager of multiple teams over my time there. I helped Hive grow to over 200 employees and to a $2B valuation. I was always most excited when I had the opportunity to lead product teams and sit between designers, engineers, testers, and executives. My strength was in communicating with these disparate parties, and making sure that the most important priorities were turned into clear action items for each. I most enjoyed the work of taking executive goals, distilling them to clear information architectures, then working creatively with designers to help us think outside the box about how we can satisfy the underlying goals of the architecture in potentially new and innovative ways.
Over the last two years, I have begun working on side projects to explore my own passion for spatial interfaces. I took a GIS class at Columbia GSAPP last year, and I built two apps called MIX and Wu Wei that were released this past January. MIX is a platform for augmented reality public art experiences, and explores how augmented reality can help us rethink our experience of public spaces. Wu Wei is an experiment on how to make AI most useful in spatial interfaces. MIX is available on iOS, tvOS, and visionOS, and Wu Wei is available for visionOS. I have built these projects largely myself, but I also manage a freelance designer and engineer.
I write public notes on interface and system design, and I publish them on my website. A couple examples here: