DESIGN OPERATIONS
Building for the people doing the work
DESIGN OPERATIONS
Building for the people doing the work
Alongside product design, a thread runs through my career of building infrastructure for designers themselves; spaces, communities, standards, and the argument that design deserves a seat at tables it wasn't invited to.
Changing who gets to be called an inventor
Patents at IBM were driven by engineers. I became the first designer at IBM Poughkeepsie to be awarded a patent in over 13 years; then made sure I wasn't the last, mentoring others and leading cross-disciplinary invention teams.
Sometimes the work is making the conditions for the work
I returned from IBM Austin with a clear picture of what our Poughkeepsie studio was missing, and built it. The Make Lab helped move us from an emerging studio to a fully recognized member of IBM's global network.
Building infrastructure for the designers who stay invisible
Designers building Indeed's internal tools were operating in silos, quietly reinventing the same solutions. I launched the Internal UX Guild to formalize what was already happening in DMs, and give it a foundation that could outlast any one person.
THE THREAD
See something, do something
All three started the same way, I noticed something that wasn't working: a missing space, a closed door, a community operating in isolation, and asked whether anyone was going to fix it. When the answer was unclear, I started building.