Maureen Macharia is an accomplished Product Designer, entrepreneur, and community builder who is proficient at the intersection of design thinking, technology, and entrepreneurship. In her work, Macharia combines her analytical skill and human-centered approach to solve problems that identify needs and opportunities for company growth. Macharia develops practical and contextually prominent products or solutions for…
Looking Into the Bigger Picture
In the last couple of days, my macOS got updated from “Catalina” (I was super excited about the dark mode when it first came out ) to “Big Sur,” a brand new desktop operating system for macOS. When my laptop finished the update, the new look sort of nudged me to clean up and reorganize…
A Dystopian Utopia
When we think about the word “dystopia,” we usually think about movies that have to deal with zombies or catastrophic disasters. We visualize the dystopian world as an apocalyptic atmosphere or a disoriented society with people that are consistently suffering. However, technology dystopia may pull the trick on us to believe otherwise, shaping the illusion…
Could a Designer be a Murder?
Northern California has been dealing with catastrophic seasonal fires for the last couple of years. Its deadly blaze has killed over 85 and destroyed 18,804 homes in 2018, according to USA TODAY. If you remember, this year’s wildfire was extremely severe, and it lasted for a couple of months until it got under control. During this…
How “Candy Sorting” Helped Me Understand IA
Words like “data” and “system” frighten me: whenever I see these two words, I feel like they have to do with complex materials and information or stuff that requires much effort to figure out. When I encounter any academic material with these two words, my enthusiasm would be deflated by half. Just like when I…
Giorgia Lupi – An Advocate of Data Humanism
Giorgia Lupi is an information designer and data-driven researcher. She is currently a Partner at Pentagram, the world’s largest independent design consultancy, and a co-author of Dear Data, a collection of hand-drawn data visualizations. With her humanistic approach to data, in her practice, Lupi seeks to humanize and confronts the impersonality of data, designing captivating visual…
A School Project to a Five Billion Dollars App
Twitter is one of the most popular app people are using today, yet, it is one of the earliest social networking services in the twenty-first century, along with Facebook and Youtube. Today, with over 145 million daily users, there are 6,000 tweets sent each second on average. That’s 500 million tweets sent each day. Therefore,…
The Early Internet
The WELL, the name itself, even sounds very utopian to me. Indeed, it was the new beginning of the internet and the birth of the virtual community. What I find fascinating is that the similarities between the Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design and today’s social media. All of these eight rules are so profound…
Ovetta Sampson
Ovetta Sampson is a UX designer and design researcher driven by data science and ethical design. She sees herself as a problem solver by using a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods to inspire innovations in diverse industries, including transportation, IoT, and service. As a Principal Creative Director at Microsoft, Sampson works with multidisciplinary teams…
Why Role-Playing Games are(were) So Popular
As a gamer, I play RPG(role-playing game) every day. When I say every day, I literally meant seven days a week nonstop. There is a reason why RPG is so addicting because it gives you the first-person perspective to manipulate your character in the game. When you are playing these games, you would slowly feel…
Can We Predict the Future of Technology Base On What We Have Today?
Xerox introduced the Xerox 8010 Star Information System in 1982. This groundbreaking development was the game-changer for the new era of personal computing. Xerox Star was revolutionary; it had the capability to integrate technologies and innovations that have since become standard in personal computers. In the demo video, many hardware and software showed to be…
Visible Language Workshop – New Way of Communicating Complex Information
Muriel Cooper opened many doors for future interactive media design by pioneering the Visible Language Workshop. It created new methods of organizing, navigating, and communicating information. Christopher Alexander’s patterns and the Visible Language Workshop share some similar elements and concepts. In Alexander’s patterns, he uses categorization to optimize spaces and environment, whereas, in the information…
Architecting Space to Digital Workplace
Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language inspired me to view architectural design in a completely different way. Before, I have never considered a workplace or a neighborhood that can be such a critical space for connecting people and improving their wellbeing. I always assumed that the architect’s job is to design and build appealing and functional buildings. Therefore,…
Oen Michael Hammonds – IBM Design Principal
Oen Michael Hammonds is an experienced designer, advocate, and lifelong educator. For over three years, Hammonds has been working with cross-functional teams at IBM as their Design Principal. As the lead facilitator, Hammonds has designed across the gamut. From services and advertising to graphic and interaction design, Hammonds collaboratively directs IBM global employee experiences’ creative…
Kristy Tillman – Design is a Tool to Aid
Kristy Tillman is an interaction designer who is currently working as the head of global experience design for Slack. In this role, she is responsible for translating Slack’s culture and vision into design strategy and human experience across Slack’s international workplaces. Two years prior, Tillman joined Slack as the head of communication design. She built…
The Game Changer
Vannevar Bush had a vision – he believed in human flourishing and science. He wishfully envisioned the capacity of technologies would benefit humankind in this information society. To expand our knowledge in a faster and productive way, Memex was invented to make information more accessible. Bush laid the groundwork for the future to understand the…
A Better Designer…
One of the reasons for the difficulty to pin down these Mid-Century into one discipline is because they were not constrained in just one aspect or area of the design. Instead, they were considering how to finesse the human experience all around. One thing that inspired me in Charles and Ray Eames’ creative process is…
The True Spirit of Design
If we Google the word “design”, it is both a noun and a verb. As a noun, it can be interpreted as, a “plan,” “fundamental structure,” “proposal.” As a verb, “to design” indicates ” to craft something,” “to feign or simulate,” or “to forge strategically.” To trace back to its origin, etymologically, “design” means to…
Thoughts on Bauhaus House
To me, Bauhaus was an avant-garde movement. It was influenced by modernism and constructivism, a style or a moment that meant to break the forms and ideas of traditional and classical values. Not only Bauhaus was one of the first institute that accepted black students, the Bauhaus represented the concept of minimalism, theorized on primary…