Ben Shown

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.