Facilitation and Leadership

I manage and grow experience design teams. I teach design thinking and design tools workshops. And I mentor new and aspiring creatives.

I teach students new to Figma through the School of Visual Concepts. Classes run two consecutive Saturday mornings, with homework and additional assistance provided during the week. 

I've taught corporate workshops, design tools classes for Amazon’s inaugural user experience apprenticeship program, and design thinking workshops in Chicago, San Jose, and Noida, India. 

I've mentored and managed interns, developing a curriculum with an end-to-end experience, and culminating in a capstone project to kickstart their portfolio.

RECENT SESSIONS:

CORPORATE WORKSHOPS: BROOKS RUNNING, REI, MICROSOFT, CENGAGE

I'm a huge fan of Brooks running gear (having trained for and completing my first marathon on a pair of Brooks Levitate 2's in 2018), and was honored to be able to conduct a couple of Figma Fundamentals workshops with the Brooks UX team in Seattle in 2021.

SPECIAL SESSIONS

I taught an introductory design tools class as a kickoff for a cohort of  apprentices as part of Amazon's first UX apprenticeship program. 32 students spent a year going through a rigorous program where if they passed successfully they were guaranteed a full-time job at Amazon.

DESIGN THINKING WORKSHOPS

Partnering with the Vice President of Customer Experience at Aeris Communications, we created three design thinking workshops whose goal was to move an engineering-forward company towards design thinking and create a feedback loop for continuous improvement and innovation validated by internal teams and external customers. 

Employees from engineering, support, sales and marketing (15 in Chicago, 15 in San Jose, and 25 in Noida) broke out into small teams and tackled a card sort and wire framing exercise, and presented their findings to the rest of the group. The workshops were well-received, and instrumental in moving the company to a design and customer first strategy.

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