Projects
Fifteen years of design and research, looking forward.
Grouped by category. Recent AI musings sit at the top — they're the experiments that shape what I'm doing now.
AI musings
7 projectsPushing the Limits of AI App Builders
A CarPlay-style infotainment prototype built in Figma Make. Explores how far AI-assisted design-to-code workflows can be pushed, integrating real-time navigation, open-source mapping, and conversational AI.
- automotive
- voice
- Figma Make
- MapLibre
From Start to Podcast: Rapid Production with AI Tools
Testing how quickly a high-quality podcast could be produced using AI tools — research, scripting, visuals, narration, and editing — and whether the end result would be suitable for public viewing.
- NotebookLM
- ChatGPT
- Leonardo.ai
- ElevenLabs
Adding Dimensionality to Social Media Content
Turning still astrophotography images into short narrated videos. The story is generated with ChatGPT, the narration with ElevenLabs, and the background music with Suno — adding the storytelling layer that YouTube astrophotography channels use to hold attention.
- astrophotography
- ChatGPT
- ElevenLabs
- Suno
Design In The Age of AI
A functional music-player prototype built in Figma Make — a spinning record with a tonearm that tracks playback, streaming demo tracks and user-uploaded MP3s. A probe into what it feels like for designers to move from describing experiences to actually building them.
- Figma Make
- prototype
- AI tooling
- design
Fun with Figma Make — Simulating the Solar System
A NASA-accurate Solar System simulation built in Figma Make — no code required. WebGL, real Kepler orbital mechanics solved via Newton-Raphson iteration, and ephemeris data from NASA JPL Horizons.
- Figma Make
- WebGL
- physics
- education
Creating Music with Suno
Exploring music generation through Suno — built around a custom GPT in ChatGPT that blends songwriting rules with Suno's prompt syntax, turning conceptual ideas into structured prompts that turn into music.
- Suno
- ChatGPT
- music generation
- AI
From Canvas to Conversation: Designing for the Age of Agentic AI
How intelligent systems are reshaping interfaces, content, and creativity. A design philosophy talk on agentic systems — the shift from usability to understanding, the perception/reasoning/expression triad, and the ethics of systems that don't just respond but act.
- agentic AI
- interaction design
- essay
Design
8 projectsNovo Ride by Telenav
An in-car infotainment app focused on promoting safer driving — surfacing on-road behavior insights, daily breakdowns, gamified challenges, and a rewards layer tying safe-driving streaks back to tangible payouts.
- automotive
- behavioral design
- safety
- infotainment
Matterport Capture
The iPad app operators used to drive Matterport's Pro1 and Pro2 cameras through a building and produce a scan project ready for cloud processing into a 3D model.
- 3D capture
- iPad
- operator tools
- field tools
Matterport Showcase
The embeddable WebGL 3D web player. The surface real-estate listings, museums, hotels, and retail stores used to let visitors walk through a Matterport scan in a browser.
- 3D web
- WebGL
- embeddable players
Matterport Viewing App
The iOS and Android app for visitors browsing Matterport 3D models — with Cardboard VR support in later versions. Matterport's direct-to-consumer surface during the era.
- mobile UX
- 3D web
- VR
Matterport Workshop
The cloud-side editor at my.matterport.com — where Capture projects became publishable Showcase models. Tag authoring, scan management, sharing controls, and embed configuration.
- 3D editing
- web app
- content tooling
Motorola Assist
An activity-detection app that morphed the phone according to the user's current context — sleep, driving, meetings, at home — and automated the right behavior with zero or minimal setup.
- context-aware
- notifications
- ambient
- Motorola
JCP Guided Navigation Menu System
Guided navigation menu solution for JCPenney.com built on the Endeca engine — competitive teardown, design exploration, usability testing, and a UI requirements document the JCP engineering team built against.
- e-commerce
- guided navigation
- Endeca
- JCPenney
JCP Bridal Registry
A bridal registry redesign for JCPenney.com during the Razorfish era. Mapped the wedding registry process from three angles — bride & groom, store, and guests — then heuristic-evaluated competing online registries and walked the in-store experiences at major competitors to identify what worked and what didn't.
- e-commerce
- bridal registry
- JCPenney
- Razorfish
Research
4 projectsFocus-Group Validation of the Novo Ride Concept
Concept validation for Novo Ride exploring whether gamification mechanics — points, streaks, peer comparison — could meaningfully encourage safer driving and increase engagement. Participants reviewed visual concepts and animated prototypes and gave structured feedback on what landed, what didn't, and why.
- research
- focus group
- gamification
- Novo Ride
How Rewards Shape Behavior: A Secondary Research Synthesis
A broad secondary-research effort examining how monetary and non-monetary rewards influence app engagement and sustained-use frequency. Background research that fed into the gamification strategy for Novo Ride.
- research
- secondary research
- behavioral
- gamification
In-Vehicle Voice Assistant — 2020 Research Deck
A 2020 research deck on voice assistant UX for in-vehicle infotainment. Covers the problems voice assistants solve in the car, the current market landscape, and recommendations for improving the Telenav voice assistant experience.
- voice UX
- automotive
- research
PhD: Orienting Schemata in Wayfinding
Doctoral dissertation in cognitive psychology — 'The Acquisition of Orienting Schemata and their Effect on Wayfinding in Virtual Environments' (University of Minnesota, May 2004; advisor Charles R. Fletcher). Three virtual-environment studies showing that wayfinders acquire abstract generic spatial knowledge — orienting schemata — through induction across multiple environment instances, and that this knowledge measurably reduces search effort in novel places built from the same structural regularities.
- cognitive psychology
- wayfinding
- spatial cognition
- virtual environments