I am a hardworking User Experience Engineer who is passionate about the intersection of design and technology.
Designer
I have honed my skills in design over the past eight years exploring web, mobile, and print. All of my creations use this knowledge as a foundation.
Technologist
Ever since my very early childhood, I have been fascinated by technology. It is what I ponder, discuss, and research every day.
Engineer
My formal education is in Mechanical Engineering at The Cooper Union. I have a solid background in mechanics, thermodynamics, and system controls.
Portfolio
My work centers on simplifying usability of user experiences and researching new ways technology can benefit humanity.
Rent the Runway
Atomic Design
After Effects
Animations
Mechanics & Robotics
Design and Fabrication
Rent the Runway
Product Intern
The Wall Street Journal
Design Technology Intern
Device Factory
Product Designer & Developer
Industrial Design
Engineering Course
To Due
iOS & OS X App
The GAIA Project
Engineering Design Project
About Me
Where I've been and what I've been up to.
Fall 2012
The Cooper Union
Cooper is a small school of creators in the heart of Manhattan offering full tuition scholarships to every artist, architect, and engineer that is able to gain admission. It has been my home over the past three years and I am so thankful for everything it stands for.
Summer 2013
To Due
To Due was my first large public project: An app to create an experience that at the time, was not available in any other app. The app uses iCloud to sync tasks between an iOS app and a companion task-bar based Mac App, allowing tasks to always be a click or tap away no matter what you are doing.
Summer - Winter 2014
The Wall Street Journal
While at The Wall Street Journal I worked on three projects: Lightboard, WSJ Scholar, and WSJ Highlighter. Lightboard is a program that runs on a massive LED board that spans three floors of the office and delivers Twitter performance information to employees at a glance. WSJ Scholar aims at reintroducing a younger generation to the WSJ brand and WSJ Highlighter offers a new interaction with WSJ in which readers can highlight important information and a back end can synthesize the most important parts of the article with no time spent by the initial writer of the article.
Summer 2015 - Present
Rent the Runway
My most recent summer was spent at Rent the Runway, a rapidly growing start up in SoHo. During my time there I worked with the Product Team on UX flows and potential animations for an upcoming rebrand.
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Rent the Runway
As a product intern I rapidly explored UI solutions for both web and iOS during a pivotal rebranding in the company.
As a product intern at Rent the Runway, I worked on rapidly prototyping and developing a new user interface for a fast-paced company-wide rebranding. To begin my time, I explored ways in which animations could be more widely integrated into the site as well as created a guide on how to best programmatically implement them using variations of CSS alone, javascript alone, as well as combining the two to optimize performance. The animations were created in After Effects, exported to PNGs and then compiled into an animation sprite sheet in Photoshop. Several examples can be seen below as well as a full guide I wrote on their implementation. Simply tap or click the icons in the pink tiles below to experience some of the animations I created for RtR.
The vast majority of my time and effort at Rent the Runway went into the rebranding that occurred. I worked alongside RTR’s UX lead to create interactive full prototypes that could be used for user testing ahead of the launch as well as explored interface options for the full launch of the unlimited subscription to RTR.
Lastly, as a part of an intern project, I explored more creative interactions for the site such as shoppable videos and new ways to interact with the Unlimited Subscription business model. Shopable videos allow the user to click interesting items as they view the video and then review the items they selected at the end of the video.
Lightboard - an exploration of engaging work space information and interaction design.
Lightboard is an exploration of the opportunities offered by a large LED environmental display in the Dow Jones midtown office. With a highly visible screen spanning multiple floors, it provides an excellent canvas for data visualization and disseminating information. Data drives decisions—especially at a company like Dow Jones, but that data does not have to be boring or impersonal. Data can be remarkable if it's presented remarkably. Due to its importance and easy availability, Lightboard's current focus is cataloging and exploring Twitter data from the @WSJ handle. Lightboard then makes the data interactive through the use of an iPhone app which lets users interface with the board by playing games on it, viewing its data on the go, and posting memos to the board for the whole company to see.
On the team, I both programmed and aided in designing the iOS component of Lighboard. Additionally, I used Socket.IO to set up communication between the iOS app and the node.js server that powers Lightboard’s back end.
Device Factory is a small NYC based startup that produces the swiss army knife of accelerometers, the DF1. The DF1 is a small Bluetooth LE beacon that computes and wirelessly transmits accelerometer data at a maximum of 50Hz to a companion iPhone app.
As a developer for this company, I am in charge of both the design and the programming of their iOS app that communicates with the DF1. The design consists of three primary views, plus an on boarding sequence. The user first sees a list of all DF1’s that are in range and is allowed to select which DF1 they would like to interact with. Once selected, the user is presented with a dashboard of live data being retrieved. Lastly, a configuration view allows users to customize which widgets they would like to see and what those widgets should do. This allows the DF1 to function in multiple use cases, from recording scientific data to getting notifications when the DF1 experiences motion or an impact over a user determined threshold.
When it comes to caring for my technology, I am probably one of the most obsessive people you will meet. I hate having a case on my phone because of how it looks, but additionally never like putting my phone down on tables or other hard surfaces because of this (especially with the camera jutting out on the iPhone 6). As a previous solution, I would simply carry around a few microfiber clothes in my pocket or bag, but these would frequently be forgotten or get covered in dust from being crumpled up and thrown in my bag. As a solution to this, I investigated and invented numerous alternatives to cases to solve this problem, finally settling on the design of Float Card. It is a credit card sized piece of plastic fully enveloped in microfiber. It fits in your wallet so you will always have it and can then be placed under the phone on any surface for a worry free experience. As a added bonus the card can be used to clean your phone’s screen if it gets covered in finger prints.
To Due
Task management simplified.
To Due is my most comprehensive, personal, and long lasting project. It has been entirely designed and written by me and seeks to create a seamless and simplified task management solution. By having the entire application live in the menubar of the mac, tasks are always just a click away. No need to launch and quit and app, or throw a clunky window to the side so you can focus on the rest of your work. Instead To Due is there when you need it and gone when you don’t. Furthermore, it auto-prioritizes your tasks based on how urgently they are due, giving a color category to each. Red is due in the next 24 hours, yellow is this week, and green tasks are due in more than a week. Lastly, it offers a quick way to create multiple reminders for a task with just a tap. In stead of opting for scroll wheels to set reminder times, To Due uses easy one tap/click toggles for convenient sets of reminder times.
The Gaia Project
A reimagining and optimization of urban agriculture.
The GAIA project was an effort by a group of engineering students at The Cooper Union to create an urban plant growth system that is novel, modular, and maximizes output for a given space while contributing to a closed loop system. This means that all inputs for the system must come from reusable sources and the structure must reuse its waste. The first version of the system, pictured above uses a "bookcase" design with tracks that allow for expanding volume as plants grow. Bays along the bottom allow for composting with tracks that churn the compost every time more contents are added.
The current version of the GAIA structure is based on a growing spiral. The spirals alternate per unit of the system to allow the plants to grow in a tight environment that maximizes the use of space. A hydroponic system in tandem with arms jutting out from a central column further assists achieving maximum output per unit volume.
Mechanics and Robotics
Throughout my engineering education I focused my energy on autonomous robotics and industrial mechanics.
The above video demonstrates the autonomous logic of The Royal Pain. This robot is capable of navigating an environment (similar to how a Roomba would) using sonar sensors. Then, when it approaches a goal, marked by an IR, led, the robot is able to detect the LED marker and launch a ping pong ball at the goal.
The above video demonstrates a program written in VAL II for the PUMA 700 industrial robot that draws the Cooper Union logo using different color markers. The robot is old and has poor accuracy and repeatability, leading to some flaws in the final drawing.
Lastly, The White Knight, pictured above, is a sumo robot that uses solely bread board logic to power its decision making. By using three IR sensors, the bot is able to detect when it is approaching the boundary of the ring and adjust its position accordingly.
After Effects Animations
Ever since high school I have been exploring the potential uses of animation for both practical and entertainment purposes.
The above animation is a playful exploration of motion using elements from numerous past projects I have worked on.
This animation uses framy by frame motion tracking to overlay a history of Apple ads on top of a more recent iPhone Ad.
Lastly, this animation centers on simple shapes and transitions.
Atomic Design Style Guide
Based on the atomic design principles of Brad Frost, this style guide links into the Rent the Runway storefront application to provide constantly up to date styles for company use.
As Rent the Runway's online store front evolves, the CSS and front end frameworks that support it have become more and more complex. Decisions made by the creative, product, and engineering teams all add to the complexity and decentralization of our global styles. This is exactly where an atomic design based style guide can come in to help.
React is a front end javascript framework that allows for the separation of reused user facing elements into components. The style guide is a systematic breakdown of the site and creation of these React components to be used by the front end team. This directly links into the very same sass files that power the site's front end, which allows for seamless updates of both the style guide and the actual site itself. Change the font on a button in the style guide and it is instantly reflected site wide.
As an additional feature of the guide, I have analyzed the grids on dozens of Rent the Runway pages in order to develop a singular grid system based on Twitter Bootstrap to power the site. This further cuts down on repeated CSS, cleans up layouts, and speeds up development time.
So this all sounds great, but one of the biggest challenges is getting cross team collaboration and buy-in to ensure that the living style guide becomes an effective manner of generating consistent styles and fast paced development. For the engineering team, I held an Architecture Review Board for the introduction of a new grid system which passed and is being used on Rent the Runway pages today. For the product and creative teams, I have created Sketch and Photoshop documents of the elements and grid system for use, ensuring that the designs the engineering team receives can be built by the frameworks and components provided by the style guide.
The style guide will be launching later this year as a public facing document. More info will come on this project as soon as it goes live.
