Leading a team of product designers to help make government work better.

NextRequest has joined forces with ArchiveSocial and Monsido to create Optimere. We illuminate the path to trusted communications for organizations on their journey to ensure an open, optimized, and compliant presence.

As Senior Product Designer at Optimere, I am primarily responsible for building and managing the design process as well as mentorship and management of other designers at the company.

• Spearheading a new design system both in rollout, strategy, and UI design

• Managing other product designers and building design processes within the org

• Launching new products and features from market research through post rollout evaluation

NextRequest is a mission-driven company that brings easy-to-use, modern software to governments. Our focus is on making public records request process-sometimes referred to as Freedom ofInformation, FOIA, FOIL, or Right-to-Know requests-easier for both requesters and the governments who manage it.

• Led research, design and execution for a new module called RapidReview. This new workflow tool helps agency staff users to better manage, process, redact, and organize email documents in their portal.

• Led research and design for the new Risk Module, which uses machine learning to proactively scan a portal's documents to identify potential risk factors before releasing to the public. This included creating a dashboard as well as in workflow features across the portal.

• Instituted foundational work and buy-in for creating a NextRequest design system, including generating design principles through internal workshops, overhauling foundational attributes including color, type, spacing, and creating workflows for collaborating with lead engineers through the component design process. Like all design systems, this is an ongoing work in progress.

Previously led product design at a research design lab in Emerson College for 4 years. During that time I shipped and supported four games, two Unity games made in collaboration with The World Bank (Risk Horizon and Unlocking Health), and two experimental web-app multiplayer games (Emerging Citizens and AtStake).

I also led product design for other initiatives and projects including the Public Engagement Roadmap (a web based toolkit that helps local government engage with its citizens), Boston Civic Media (a web portal which allows college students to cross register for classes across universities), and Databasic (a suite of easy-to-use web tools for beginners that introduce concepts of working with data). With such a small team, I was also responsible for managing the agile development process, including QA and user testing.

I taught introduction to game design in the visual media arts program for the 2016-2017 school year.

Previously taught writing and rhetoric to undergraduate freshman at Emerson College with a focus in interactive media and multimodal writing.

During that class I created a curriculum which combined rhetorical writing and game design. In collaboration with professional game designers, students produced games for social change for an outside client. I secured small funding through a grant in order to hire Boston game designers and find a community content partner/client. I then organized the presentation and delivery of student created games at a college sponsored showcase where they were playable by the wider public.

You can read more about this project here: http://www.emerson.edu/news-events/emerson-college-today/students-design-violence-prevention-games#.VlpPm-I8rFA