IBM

A lot of the work lived between research and product. The teams had powerful technical capabilities, but those capabilities needed interfaces, stories, demos, and interaction models before executives, clients, developers, or broader audiences could understand what they meant.

My role was to translate that complexity into experiences that felt legible and credible. Sometimes that meant designing interfaces. Sometimes it meant building prototypes, creating explainer videos, shaping technical narratives, or helping research teams communicate how a system worked and why it mattered.

I worked on IBM Research’s Project Debater before generative AI became mainstream, helping design user interfaces for live debate experiences and premier IBM events including CES and IBM Think.

I also created system-explainer videos in collaboration with research teams, including story, assets, and animation. The goal was to make a complex NLP and argument-generation system understandable to audiences that ranged from researchers to executives to public-event attendees.

I worked on early IBM Quantum and Qiskit interface concepts before IBM Quantum became a broader commercial effort. That included interface explorations, educational material, and visual systems that helped explain how quantum computing worked and how people could begin using Qiskit.

I also created on-site visualizations for quantum computing experiences, including visual feedback around people’s quantum circuits as they were queued and computed. The work was less about making quantum simple and more about making an unfamiliar system visible enough that people could reason about it.

Across IBM Research and Watson IoT experiences, I contributed to interfaces and demos involving robotics, haptics, multi-screen interaction, and physical computing. These projects explored how digital interfaces could extend into physical environments, including screen movement, tactile feedback, and spatial interaction.

That work became part of a broader pattern in my career: taking systems that are technically novel, difficult to explain, or invisible to most users, and designing ways for people to see, manipulate, and understand them.

This role capped six years at IBM across IBM Cybersecurity, IBM Design, and IBM Research, where my work spanned cybersecurity, HCI, AI, quantum, robotics, and emerging interfaces.

I also served on an Invention Disclosure Board, helping review, shape, and prioritize technical invention submissions for legal docketing. Several of these projects contributed to a broader patent and research portfolio that has been cited 220+ times.

IBM taught me that design can be a bridge between research, product, business, and technical credibility. In emerging technology, the interface is often the first place where an idea becomes understandable enough to evaluate.

That lesson has carried through the rest of my career: the most useful design work is not just visual polish. It is the act of making hard systems visible, testable, explainable, and usable enough for people to make decisions with them.