Purpose
Design is both the process and the product of empathy, purpose, function, form, delight — and a great story. With positivity, passion, patience, and wit, I lead teams and collaborate with partners to successfully build experiences that enhance lives.
Professional experience
Current commitments
Founder & CEO, PeopleWork Partners, design recruiting and leadership coaching.
Partner, Mandel Creative, leadership coaching and community mentorship.
Chair, Master of Interaction Design Program, California College of the Arts, May 2020–present. Leading and scaling a successful, unique one-year graduate program into its 2.0 by updating its curriculum, diversifying its faculty base, introducing new electives, advisory, and more.
With faculty, I interview and recruit dozens of adjuncts each year, lead and facilitate cross-section conversations, and build camaraderie and community. With prospective students, I lead a faculty team to review 300+ applications each year, market the program with portfolio AMAs and infosessions, and have augmented the application process with new standards and workflows.
With each year-long cohort of ~60 students, I lead orientation and onboarding, create community through socialization and networking, advise student project teams, interact with industry clients and partners, and mentor students 1:1. With the Design Division, I market the program through events and lectures (including with San Francisco Design Week and other industry events), coordinate promotion and video documentation, and share & network with other Chairs.
Also, I teach Designing your Career, and Leadership by Design, and offer workshops in the program.
Previous commitments
Head of Design [fractional], MeetingPulse, 2019–2022. Leadership and advisory with CEO & Founder. Recruiting for Founding Designer, CMO, and CTO. Led product + brand design, including marketing, story, value prop, pitching and pitch deck design, content, UX, UI, branded swag, and more. Helped close a seed round through networking and pitching. Established cultural practices for globally distributed team. Led a research effort and managed an external partner to bring the product to a 2.0.
Founder & CEO, Startnership, San Francisco, CA, 2013–2022. Productizing design deliverables in focused workshops. Clients ranged from startups and founding teams to enterprise orgs with new initiatives. Clients included: Salesforce, Blend, Cloudflare, MeetingPulse, CSTMR, Buildium, StartOut, DreamFund, SloFoodGroup, Colloquial Insights, Trove, Logobase, Tizra, Madge’s Hatbox, We The Future, and more.
Design Operations Founder, Twitter, San Francisco, CA, 2016–2018. As the first DesignOps person inside Twitter’s Product Team, my role was strategic, cultural, and situational. I bridged the Brand/Marketing and Product teams. Supporting a distributed team of 60–100 designers, some of the programs I created and led were:
weekly design critiques, facilitation, socialization, documentation, and ongoing process improvement – including the prototyping of a CritKit for anytime, anywhere crits
initiating Product and Data Science critiques, modeled after Product critiques
branding and naming the design system, Horizon, including ongoing education to designers about its use, effectiveness, and governance
spearheading the Chat education & inspiration event series, and hosting speakers
founding a cross-functional OpsTeam, including roadmap sync
and more, including design process, design principles, project leaderboard, library of experiments & case studies, standardizing on tools, blog writing & facilitation, guest visits from local UX classes, mentoring program, recruiting events, industry promotion on DesignBetter.co, and studio space configuration
Founding Designer, IBM Cloud Garage, San Francisco, CA, 2015–2016. Led workshops and sprints around the world, using a suite of IBM Design tools, for both startups and Fortune 500 global corporations. Pitched new client business, improved internal team processes and marketing collateral, customized workshop curriculum to local markets, aligned tools & communications methods of six locations.
Founder & CEO, Schwadesign, Providence, RI and San Francisco, CA, 1997–2017. Schwadesign was a network of brand strategists, content strategists, designers of all kinds, and developers, all curated in project-specific teams to reflect client needs. Clients included Blue Man Group, the City of Providence RI, DentaQuest, Friends of Dana-Farber, AIDS Action Committee of MA, MassEquality, Harvard University Systems Biology PhD Program, Brown University, Jobs for the Future, Ounce Labs, Perforce, MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, Trinity Pharma.
Workshops, talks, and podcast episodes
2021–09 Fifteen Seconds, Graz, Austria [online]
2021–07 Segment / Twilio, Before you ship, relationship
2020–11 Workshop for IBM Digital Growth & Commerce [online]
2020–06 Workshop and Presentation at Omnichannel X, Amsterdam, Netherlands [online]
2020–06 Presented at FH Johanneum, Graz, Austria [online]
2019–12 Workshop on Design A Better Presentation at General Assembly, Seattle, WA
2019–11 Presented at Design Thinkers, Toronto, Canada
2019–09 Presented at Adobe’s IxDD World Interaction Design Day, San Francisco, CA
2019–09 Presented at Joint Futures, Helsinki, Finland
2019–01 Workshop during In/Visible Talks, Feedback: The Gift you Keep on Giving (and Receiving), San Francisco, CA
2019–03 Presented at South Dakota Advertising Federation, Sioux Falls, SD
2018–11 Presented at Global Innovation Forum, London, UK
2018–09 Workshop about The People Layer at the Google Sprint Conference, San Francisco, CA
2018–08 Workshop at Otis College of Art + Design, Los Angeles, CA
2018–05 Presented at Bucharest Tech Week, Bucharest, Romania
2018–05 Presented at HOW Design Live, Boston, MA
2018–04 Presented at Designers & Geeks’ “Get Shit Done Club,” San Francisco, CA
2018–01 Profiled on Obsessed with Design Podcast [iTunes]
2017–11 Profiled on Meet the Creatives Podcast [iTunes]
2017–11 Presented at Clarity Conference, San Francisco, CA
2017–10 Presented “14 Lessons x 22 Years” at Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts #Redesignschool, Phoenix, AZ
2017–09 Presented at Hopscotch Design Festival, Raleigh, NC
2016 Episode 1, This Makes Me Happy Podcast
Community building
AIGA, the professional association for design, 1994–2020
StartOut, empowering LGBT entrepreneurs, 2013–2020
National Novel Writing Month, Book cover designer, 2012–2013
Betaspring startup accelerator, Mentor, 2008–2010
ReBrand, Jury Coordinator, 2004–2007
Teaching
California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA
Designing Your Career, MFA / MDes / DMBA programs, Spring 2019–2024
General Assembly, San Francisco, CA
Visual Design Fellow, 2015–2016
Visual Design Instructor (four cohorts), 2015–2017
CreativeLive, San Francisco, CA
Instructor, Building A Brand Book: When, Why, and How, October 2015
AIGA Facilitation by Design
Co-facilitator, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA, June 2015
Co-facilitator, Walmart Labs, San Bruno, CA, October 2015
College of Art and Design, Lesley University, Boston, MA
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA
Writing
Hello Mr. Kickstarter & writer for issue 01 and 02 in start-up gay-oriented print quarterly
Hunger Mountain, “My Time with Maurice,” a remembrance of collaborating with Maurice Sendak
Lecturing & jurying
2000–2017 Guest lectures and final portfolio crits at RISD, UCLA Extension, California College of the Arts, Academy of Art SF, University of San Francisco, Lesley College of Art & Design, MassArt, University of Connecticut at Storrs, New England Art Institute, Johnson & Wales, Rutgers University, Roger Williams University
2021 Juror, Adobe Creative Live Jam with Washington State University
2019 Juror, Adobe Creative Live Jam with Washington State University
2010 Presenter, Connecticut Art Director’s Club, ReBrand Case Studies, New Haven, CT
2010 Presenter, UConn Storrs, New Haven, CT
2009 Panelist, RISD/Careers/Build
2009 Juror, Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, Design Innovation Grant
2009 Presenter, AIGA, Make/Think National Design Conference, Memphis TN (invited)
2009 Panelist, RI Economic Development Corporation, “Consulting in the Downturn”
2009 Panelist, Brown University Forum for Enterprise talk, “Unique Paths to Success”
2009 Juror, Connecticut Art Director’s Club 34th Annual Awards Show
2008 Juror, AIGA Charlotte’s Boom! Regional Design Show
Press & awards
2019–03 “Design in Tech report 2019” by John Maeda, cited
2018–12 “Embracing open design in 2019,” UX Collective, contributor and reviewer
2017–12 “18 designers predict UI/UX trends for 2018,” Figma blog, contributor
2017–05 “How San Francisco is Redefining Design,” Print Magazine
2014 Featured in “Gays and the Tech Industry,” Forbes
2014 Featured in “The First-Ever Meet-Up of Gay Designtrepreneurs,” ReCode
2013 ReBrand 100 Merit Award – Trinity Pharma rebrand
2010 ReBrand 100 Merit Award – Providence the Creative Capital rebrand
2010 ReBrand 100 Notable Award – Highlander Charter School rebrand
2007 Print Magazine Regional Design Annual – Peter Roux identity
2007 ReBrand 100 Notable Award – Harvard Systems Biology PhD Program rebrand
2007 Featured in “Extreme Makeover,” The Wall Street Journal
2007 Featured in “A Clearinghouse for Design Talent,” Providence Business News
2006 Featured in “Going Up,” The Boston Globe
2006 ReBrand 100 Distinction Award – 360 NeuroMuscular Therapy rebrand
2006 RSA Best Tradeshow Booth Award – Ounce Labs
2005 ReBrand 100 Merit Award – Well Well Well, Inc. rebrand
2005 Profiled in Inspirability: 40 Top Designers Speak Out About What Inspires
2005 Bookbuilders of Boston Best in Category – Great Chefs Cooking for Great Friends cookbook
2004 Best of Business Card Design 6, Rockport Publishers – Schwadesign identity
2003 What Teams Can Do, Stora Enso – BU Center for International Health brochure
2001 Best of New England [BoNE] Show, AIGA Boston – Thompson Design Group rebrand
1994 Advertising Women of New York [AWNY]
Education
1994, Ithaca College Bachelor of Arts in Media Studies, English minor
2011, Yale School of Management, Business Perspectives for Creative Leaders