Resume

Skills

• Sketching & Prototyping – storyboards, software, form, electronic or video sketches. I am adept at creating a broad variety of sketches and prototypes at various fidelities.
• Software – Illustrator, Flash, Studio Tools, Processing, Arduino, Sketchbook Pro, iMovie and Keynote. Anything Office or Adobe I can pick up and use pretty quickly.
• Presentations & Engagements : I’m a strong presenter and communicator of design. I am equally comfortable presenting to a large audience or engaging with a small group of clients.
• User Research – I believe in observation and empathy. I can take insights and synthesize them into stories to inspire meaningful design solutions.
• Languages – Fluent in spoken Hindi and Urdu. I can read and speak basic Arabic.

Passion

• Designing meaningful artifacts, ecosystems and services.
• Making a difference through design for social innovation.
• Combining insightful strategy with detailed design craft.
• Working with good people and being a good person to work with.

Experience

frog design . Senior Interaction Designer  (May 2010 – Present)

• Helping the world’s leading companies create and bring to market meaningful products, services, and experiences. A lot of the work is incredibly fun and also incredibly secret.

eBay . Interaction Designer (July 2007 to May 2010)

• Casual Selling – I lead the efforts for the redesign and simplification of the casual selling experience where our focus was to make the average person feel that their interaction with eBay was quick, supportive and worthwhile.
• My eBay – Discovery and redesign of My eBay, the buying and selling dashboard on eBay. I was responsible for sketching visions, presenting them to senior executives, creating wireframes, prototyping different interactions, participating in user research and working with a team of visual designers and content people to take the design to final development.
• Merchandising – Lead designer and strategist for eBay’s recommendations and merchandising system. Creating a consistent methodology for how customers are introduced to and interact with suggestions from the eBay’s brand.
• Visual Thinking – Evangelizing visual thinking through sketch jams to practice skills and through training the user research team to turn their insights into visual stories.
• Service Design – Introducing service design methodologies (systems thinking, touchpoint and blueprints) as a means to creating real and meaningful value for our customers. I coordinated an internal conference where we invited experts and had the whole user experience team (30+ people) practice the service blueprinting process.
• Patterns – I worked with the eBay patterns team and used service design methods to created a map that recorded all the touchpoints a customer might take on eBay. The map is used by today by various teams as a tool to think holistically how their designs affect the broader ecosystem.

ESC (Electronic Sketching Club) .  Co-Founder  (March 2009 to March 2010)

• Community Building – Finding a lack of designer friendly spaces to hack and play with the amassing electronic prototyping techniques I, along with Leslie Chicone, founded ESC a electronic sketching club. There we organized a monthly collective of designers interested in learning about and playing with arduinos, LEDs, circuit bending and electronics.
• ESC Guide – Wrote a Designer’s Guide to getting started with electronic sketching which is used extensively by the electronic sketching club and arduino community.

XPLANE . Interaction Designer (February 2006 to July 2007)

• Clients – I managed clients directly including Microsoft, Adidas, A123, Edgenuity, Intel and Harley Davidson. I excelled at facilitating client engagements where I would live sketch to collect complex information, then synthesize and blueprint it for illustrators to finalize.
• Org Design – As one of the first designers to be hired into the Portland office I took on a number of projects, in addition to client work, to help grow and develop the new office. I started and maintained the first company wiki to help the different offices share knowledge, developed visual thinking training for new employees and much more. When I think back my XPLANE experience was as much about how to design a company as it was about doing client work.
• Interactive XPLANations – I worked on the first new interactive XPLANations and helped move the business towards motion based information design. Eventually through those initiatives I got to work on a Intel home medical device where we did the UI focused around the elderly and the nurses that would take care of them.

Gulfstream Aerospace . Design Research & Interaction Design Intern (March 2005 to August 2005)

• User Research – I conducted research at the Gulfstream plant, performed video ethnography on full scale mock-ups and designed aircraft passenger control interfaces as part of a project focused on the redesign of G5 luxury aircraft interiors.

Education

California College of the Arts . MBA in Design Strategy (August 2009 to Present)

• The groundbreaking MBA program combines business and design thinking to help students to become next-generation of multidisciplinary leaders and innovators.

Savannah College of Art and Design . Industrial Design & Interaction Design (2001 to 2005)

• While at SCAD I learned an industrial design methods and craft for problem solving and an interaction design process for research and synthesis. I find myself what I learned in my undergraduate education in almost every design problem I tackle.

University of Southern California . Computer Engineering (Transferred) (1999 to 2001)

• I started my career as an engineer and I leave this as part of my resume because even though I found myself moving to the design and business side of things I have a deep respect for engineering and think of it as an integral part of my roots. Plus my dad’s an engineer and he’s pretty cool.

Continuing Education

• Ecosystem of Design – Stanford University (2009)
• Model Based Invention and Innovation – Stanford University (2008)
• Social Entrepreneurship – Stanford University (2008)
• Thinkering Workshop – Illinois Institute of Technology (2008)
• Electronics for Artists – Pacific Northwest College of Art (2006)