hello world
I’m a second-year Masters student at the UC Berkeley School of Information. Making a career change from public policy research into product management, I’m interested in topics including uncertainty and intuition, sensors and data exhaust, and behavioral change.
After working for a few years in the healthcare policy field, I was getting tired of the lack of interest in good user experiences — in particular, the paradigm in which innumerable little rules and provisions were stitched together in an attempt to precisely calibrate incentives to do the “right” thing… when a typical person doesn’t have the time, contextual knowledge, or access to grasp what they’re being encouraged to do. Choosing a health insurance plan is very difficult; creating a single website where consumers can look at plans side-by-side tries to address the access dimension, but if you want the other two, I would strongly recommend finding a Navigator non-profit to help you shop.
I’ve lived in Oakland for the past six years; prior to that I was in Washington DC, but I grew up in Denver. I double-majored in Math and History as an undergrad, the upshot of which is that I have a good feel for data but also a healthy amount of caution when it comes to drawing conclusions from it. Free-time activities include hiking in the east bay hills and board games.
A type of object I’m excited about is lighting fixtures. The light source itself has qualities like direction / dispersal, color temperature, and brightness, which may be affected by what it’s emplaced in (e.g., behind frosted glass or a textile shade). The materiality of the fixture has aesthetic or stylistic qualities, but its effect on the user depends on the space it’s in — the size of the room, the size, type, and placement of furniture, and so on — and in turn, the lighting constrains what activities are comfortable in or appropriate for that space.
With respect to affordances, think about the last time you tried to use a multi-gang panel of light switches… did you flip the correct one the first time? Did you flip all three, four, or more switches only to discover that none of them controlled the fixture you actually wanted to use? My kitchen has three different sets of lights: one is under-cabinet strip lighting, but the other two are subsets of the recessed can lights in the ceiling; they’re divided not spatially-in-half but rather by size/brightness, with one being a set of bright, cold CFL bulbs over a few key task areas and the other, warmer-colored bulbs on a dimmer switch that illuminated the whole space.
