As a kid, I wanted to be an engineer and make things people could use. I went on to live and teach in East Africa, help a school light its classrooms, and design tools for people working with AI. Today I’m Head of Experience Design for LillyDirect, where my team helps people find and access their medicines.
At Northern Illinois University, I studied engineering and joined the student chapter of Engineers Without Borders. A project could start with a question as simple as how a school heated water. Answering it meant finding out who used the kitchen, what they had on hand, and who would maintain what we built.
I first went to Kenya as a volunteer in 2007. I went on to live and work in East Africa, with projects in both Kenya and Tanzania. In western Kenya, some of that work took place in a classroom.
In 2011 I began teaching at Jane Adeny Memorial School for Girls, the year it opened. Its founders, Teresa Wasonga and Andrew Otieno, were both on the faculty at Northern Illinois University. Andrew later became an adviser to Light Up Africa. The same relationship connected a classroom in Kenya, my university in Illinois, and a company I would go on to start.
I devoted much of my time at NIU to Engineers Without Borders and served as president of our student chapter. I helped design and install solar-heating components and systems for sanitizing food. I also climbed Mount Kilimanjaro to raise money for a village.
Near Musoma, Tanzania, our chapter worked with the local organization UMABU and Tanzania Development Support at Nyegina Secondary School. The students lived on campus and needed light to study after sunset. The kitchen needed hot water. Together, the partners equipped ten classrooms with solar lighting and installed a solar water heater.
Andrew Otieno’s account describes a detail easily missed in a design drawing. The team specified zinc-plated bolts for a solar-panel frame. When they couldn’t find those bolts in local shops, they redesigned the frame so it could be welded.
I founded Light Up Africa to work on another everyday problem. Charging a phone could mean a long trip to somewhere with electricity. My teammates and I built the Zoom Box to capture energy from motion, including the motion of a bicycle, and store it for later. I cut up plastic clipboards to make an early case. Later, I borrowed a 3D printer to try other designs.
Conversations with families and entrepreneurs in Kenya changed what we were building. The generator could produce electricity. People also needed a way to store it, share it, or earn money from it. We began designing around that wider use.
At Stanford, I helped research and design Daemo, a crowdsourcing marketplace. We wanted the people doing the work to have a say in how the marketplace ran.
One question was who gets to decide when a job is finished. A worker might follow the instructions exactly and still deliver something different from what the person hiring them had in mind. We explored how the two could agree on what good work looked like before the job began.
I took my camera to Machu Picchu. In one frame, clouds hang between the mountains behind the ruins. I published that photograph on Unsplash in February 2016 so other people could use it. It’s there alongside the other photographs I’ve shared from my travels.
Founding Light Up Africa was one part of my life as an entrepreneur. I also co-founded The Simple Good, a Chicago nonprofit where young people use art to explore what good looks like in their own lives. Students turn those ideas into paintings, photographs, and murals, then share their work with the community.
I co-founded Injii around a different way for people to give. Artists could share a performance online, and people watching could support a cause while they listened.
Teaching stayed with me after my time in Kenya. Over the years I’ve mentored more than 700 product design students. One was Grace Montgomery, a Montessori educator moving into user research. She already knew how to step back and observe a classroom.
In our sessions we worked on asking open-ended questions and explaining the reasoning behind a research method. Grace later became a UX researcher. She tells that part of the story better than I can.
I became head of product at AmplifyAI and later worked as a lead product designer with MIT’s Data to AI Lab. With DataCebo, I worked on the design side of synthetic data. Its Synthetic Data Vault lets a developer generate customers, orders, and payments that fit together well enough to test an application, without using anyone’s actual purchase history.
I joined McKinsey as a Director of Experience Design. There I led designers and worked alongside engineers and data scientists on AI tools. A model could produce an answer, but we still had to understand what the person looking at it needed to decide.
I studied artificial intelligence for my Master of Science in Computer Science at Georgia Tech. As a designer, I wanted to understand what happened between giving a model an input and getting an answer back.
A decision tree is a small example of why I like working on both sides of this. You can trace a prediction back through the choices that produced it. Then there’s a design decision to make about which of those steps would help a person understand the answer.
I’m Head of Experience Design for LillyDirect. My team works on how people find and access medicines. When someone comes to LillyDirect with a prescription, our job is to help them understand what they can do next.
Outside work I’m opening my bookshelves to other readers, turning design concepts into lessons for Elements, and building Academy of Machines for people who want to learn robotics.
I do woodworking in my spare time. I use CAD and a 3D printer, too, but wood gives me a particularly direct way to check an idea. Two pieces can meet perfectly in a drawing. At the bench I can put them together, run a fingertip across the joint, and feel where one sits a little high.
Then I can take a shaving off and try the fit again.