At a boarding school near Musoma, Tanzania, a light in a classroom meant students could keep studying after sunset. I lived and worked in East Africa, and projects like that were my introduction to engineering in practice. Years later I was back in school myself, studying artificial intelligence at Georgia Tech.
As a kid, I wanted to be an engineer because I wanted to make things people could use. At Northern Illinois University, I studied engineering and got involved with 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.
In Kenya, talking with the people who would use our generator changed its design. On Daemo, a crowdsourcing project at Stanford, the people doing the work could help shape the rules as well.
I helped research and design the marketplace. Take a question as basic as whether a job is finished. A worker and the person who hired them might answer differently. Our team explored how both could have a say in what counted as good work.
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.
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 in 2019. In 2021, I worked as a freelance lead product designer with MIT’s Data to AI Lab, designing tools for people working with data and machine learning. Later that year, I joined McKinsey as a user experience lead.
Designing an interface for a model raises a particular question. When a result appears on screen, what does the person using it need to know about how the system got there? That question sits right where my interests in design and computer science meet.
After working on AI products, I was a student again. In 2023 I earned my master’s in computer science at Georgia Tech, with a focus on artificial intelligence.
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 lead experience design for LillyDirect. My team works on the experience of finding and accessing medicine. It’s a different setting from a school in Tanzania or a machine-learning lab, but the starting point is familiar. What is the person here trying to do, and what’s getting in their way?
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.