Participated in a (COVID time, remote Zoom) panel discussion about working in UI/UX.

Grateful for the opportunity to be a guest speaker in this class, which was remote due to COVID. I shared some thoughts on the interplay between Design, Technology, and Culture.

Invited back to the NYU class where Alex Staudt and I gave a talk about Prototyping in Oct 2019.

I'm one of the coaches for a course on Business Essentials for Designers offered by Designer Fund.

Taught at NYU's "Design Thinking for Creative Problem Solving" course with my friend and colleague Alex Staudt. We went through some prototyping strategies and philosophies, then shared case studies from IDEO projects on how we prototyped digital products, physical products, services, experiences, and environments. Then we ran a hectic exercise where students teamed up to build towers our of sticks– they made low-resolution sketches on paper, then moved into quick prototypes with the actual acrylic stick material. Then each team went head to head using their tower-building strategy, but this time they were building on a platform with a countdown timer which would start shaking and wobbling... the team with the tallest tower after the shaking won.

I was the Mentor in Chief at the 2019 "Reality Virtually" AR/VR/XR hackathon hosted at the MIT Media Lab. My role was to bring together an amazing team of mentors to support the hackathon participants. The mentors included web developers, game engine developers, UI/UX designers, 3D artists, and project managers. The mentor team included about 60 experienced people from places like Google, IDEO, Vimeo, Microsoft, Giphy, and other large and small organizations. My role also included creating the award categories and facilitating the hectic hackathon teambuilding moment, where about 440 individuals scramble to form their hackathon teams. The event was run by a very passionate and dedicated group of individuals who worked hard to make the event inclusive and diversely represented. Ultimately, there were just over 100 projects submitted after a four day whirlwind. There were really fascinating projects, built from scratch, and generally by teams of individuals who were strangers at the start of the hackathon. I left very exhausted and very inspired.

Harvard Alumni group Harvard in Tech is organizing a Design Leaders in Tech panel at Work-Bench in NYC. I'll be moderating a panel of Design and User Experience leads at Etsy, LearnVest, Google, and Foossa. See you there.

For this year's session in Prof. Datar's Design Thinking & Innovation course, I shared an introduction to Design Strategy (frameworking and journey mapping) as well as the methods and mindsets for ideation, like how to run an effective idea session à la IDEO (How Might We statements, moderated group brainstorms, etc.)

NEW INC is an incubator for art, design, and technology ventures affiliated with the New Museum on the Bowery in Soho. Every year a cohort of new ventures joins NEW INC to advance their projects and learn from the community. For part of their Bootcamp programming, I was invited to share an overview of the Design methodology used at IDEO and taught at Stanford d.school. This included drawing parallels to other accepted methods in the entrepreneurial space such as Agile, Lean, and Holacracy.

"Making It" (ENAS400) is a class about crafting products and business at the intersection of design, technology and entrepreneurship. Speaking about Design Sensibilities and structuring Product teams through the exciting shift from early up-start to growth-stage startup. Tag team talk with my friend and co-worker Josh Wexler.

Guest lecture in a class taught by dear friend and colleague Josh Wexler about Design Research, it's role in the innovation process, and how it is applied at Yieldmo. One of our approaches at Yieldmo is Hybrid Research, which is using quantitative data sets for qualitative findings that help identify opportunity spaces and help validate design direction.

Spoke with my colleague Josh Wexler (VP Product) about the role of prototyping for identifying product/market fit. We discussed the process of ideating, testing, and iterating on product through the example of Yieldmo product development for our mCommerce formats.

Spoke with my colleague Jane Kim (Head of A/B Testing + Optimization) about how the Yieldmo Ad Format Lab uses data to inform design. We discussed the data sources and data flows that help empower and inform new enterprise product opportunities for mCommerce.

Visited the Visual Design class at General Assembly to share stories and methods to cover generative Design brainstorming and early synthesis.

I'll be joining a really great crew of speakers at Design Driven #5 where I will share thoughts on the sensbilities of great designers. It's a yardstick for growing a Design team as well as how to to grow as a Designer. Update: I wrote up the talk for this post on Medium and here's a video of the talk!

I'll be leading a panel at the Harvard University hosted xDesign Conference. The panel will be about Design and Venture Creation. How a designer's toolkit and sensibilities bring value to a entrepreneurship and new businesses. My panelists include Michael Moskowitz (Chief Curator at eBay following the acquisition of his startup, Bureau of Trade,) Gian Pangaro (VP Design at LittleBits,) and Tim Hoover (Head of Design and Product at Canary and co-author of Kern and Burn.)

Will be at Yale University's amazing Center for Engineering, Innovation, and Design (CEID) to talk with several Design for America chapters about Design methodology, sensibilities, and new/emergent tools to empower Makers.

Ran a workshop called "Realizing Your Innovation" with Elizabeth Kelly and Jenn Sarich-Harvey at Harvard's Social Enterprise Conference. Our exercises were aimed at presenting several tools for entrepreneurs to consider user experience, mission + vision, and some business considerations towards creating sustainable value. Packed room, great crew, high energy, and great outcomes. Thanks to all who participated!

Co-lead another workshop on Creative Confidence with Michael Hendrix (IDEO partner & a location lead at the Boston studio) and Matt Brown (designer & inspiration.)

On a panel at HBS during their Marketing and CPG Club conference on the topic of Product Innovation.

Co-lead a workshop on Creative Confidence with Michael Hendrix (IDEO partner & a location lead at the Boston studio) and Matt Brown (designer & inspiration.)

Leading a session at HBS on Brand Strategy, Ideation, and Rapid Prototyping with my colleague Gian Pangaro.

Discussion on innovation methodology and Human-Centered Design with Harvard students alongside colleagues Brad Crane and Grace Nicklin.

Guest lectured with my IDEO colleagues Michelle Kwasny and Brad Crane. We talked about Human-Centered Design methodology and key behaviors that support radical collaboration and effective ideation. The session was grounded in the theme of the course, which is about creating new technology-enabled platforms for education in the MIT Media Lab teaching and learning communities.

Panelist at MassChallenge’s finalist Boot Camp session on Design for Startups. Joined a couple exceptional fellows from Design Museum Boston, Continuum, and Analogue Studio to talk with MassChallenge startup accelerator finalists.

Panelist at RISD’s Senior Studio to offer feedback and critique on students’ final projects.

Gave a talk on human-centered design methodology to an auditorium of Boston University Engineering students. A group that I was once a part of. Also talked about one of my favorite things, which is the collection of tools and platforms that make Engineering and Design incredibly accessible today and lower the barriers to entrepreneurship.

Gave a guest lecture in a class taught by my friends and colleagues Ari and Brad. This talk focused on the many ways that things get made, with particular attention to high volume and production manufacturing. I love sharing videos of metal spinning, back-country rotomolding, and showing evidence marks of manufacturing processes.

MIT Media Lab has a group of incredibly talented, accomplished, and wonderful people that are joined under the title of Director’s Fellow. Joi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, has assembled this group of people from around the world and across all possible boundaries to engage with the MIT Media Lab. The intent of this session was to introduce the Fellows to each other on this first meeting, create dialogue around how their projects could interface with the lab, and set goals / identify barriers to establish a successful collaboration.

I’m really excited to visit Yale University’s Center for Engineering, Innovation, and Design at the end of the month. Planning to cover two themes. First is about how the barrier to entrepreneurship is getting lower, how corporations are using the same tools as hobbyists, and why everyone should be taking advantage of the various tools and resources that are enabling this shift. The other part of this talk will be about setting up for success in your projects. Being intentional about Content, Process, and Relationships has been a key to my own growth and happiness in work (and life) so I hope to share some thoughts and resources in the event that this is useful to other people.

I joined my friend and colleague Todd Vanderlin in teaching a session of E50 at Harvard. We pushed our open source hard/software agenda by sharing lots of projects that use Arduino, Processing, and OpenFrameworks.

Joined my friend-colleague Matt Weiss in sharing the IDEO process of Human-Centered Design. We shared case studies and stories and had a few nice animated .gifs on top.

There’s a tremendously interesting seminar happening at Harvard/Radcliffe focused on resolving the differences between human and computational models for analyzing data. Think pattern recognition vs. computer learning. I structured and moderated an ideation session with the aim of creating exciting opportunities that might define new fields of study that merge human and machine!

Joined some of my colleagues in running a session for about 70 excellent individuals in which we discussed and exercised the practice of Human-Centered Design.

Joined a panel of esteemed fellows from the Boston-area design community to talk about what Design means for entrepreneurs. We discussed using the lens of Design to consider (and discover) the needs of the people you’re trying to serve. We conversed on the ways by which a startup should consider their offer as the holistic experience that surrounds and encapsulates the product or service that is at its core.

The Emergent Media Center opened it’s doors to me and my friend-colleague Karl Abele. We talked about some philosophy of Innovation and some concrete ways of making it happen. One piece of feedback was that I used “too many quotes.” I like quotes. Someone else said it better. (I think someone said that.)

Honored to join the “Top Innovations” panel alongside some very smart and very wonderful brand managers from L’Oreal, General Mills, and AB-InBev. Great discussion about vetting innovative concepts early, launching in the market, and what Brand means to Product.

Got a chance to share some of my personal work as well as some IDEO methods and mindsets to a group of BU Engineers. Go Terriers! It was good to come back to my alma mater to share stories and remind students that there are so many amazing things and services out there that lower the barrier to entrepreneurship for anybody, but especially Engineers. Magical times.

I joined my friend and colleague Todd Vanderlin in teaching a session of E50 at Harvard. We pushed our open source hard/software agenda by sharing lots of projects that use Arduino, Processing, and OpenFrameworks.

Ran a really fun 5-day course on Design Thinking and Human-Centered Design with a group of 60 wildly awesome undergrads and graduate students. Mostly Engineers, but there were a bunch of humans from other callings. Super fun. Here’s an article about it in the Harvard Gazette. A paper about this design thinking curriculum was published in 2012 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE.) Download it here.

Heather Fleming (Catapult Design) and Karin Carter (Nike Kitchen alum, and textile freelancer) were my muses as I did what I ought to in making the class a delight.

Joined some of my colleagues in running a session for about 70 excellent individuals in which we discussed and exercised the practice of Human-Centered Design.

Guest lectured for one session of Prof. Srikant Datar’s HBS class on Design Thinking and Innovation. This session is all about building empathy with the humans you’re trying to serve and using some tools borrowed from Anthropology and beyond to create an actionable plan for bringing worthwhile and valuable products/services to the world.

My colleague Ann Kim and I led a one-day workshop with the 2013 Fellows in the Mozilla/Knight Foundation OpenNews program. We lectured on human-centered design tools and process, then coached the OpenNews Fellows through some interviews with newsroom stakeholders at the Boston Globe.

Enjoyed the distinct honor of playing second fiddle to the inimitable Prof. Dave Beach.

Lead the programming of Stanford’s Design lecture series. The series included talks from Maira Kalman, Andy Spade, Ben Fry, Jon Cagan, Genevieve Bell, and Alex Wipperfurth. A diverse and inspirational collection of perspectives on design. This was a tremendous honor for me to be a part of, not to mention a great excuse to connect with some of my idols across the landscape of Design.