Most recently, I've been working on AI initiatives as a staff product designer at SoFi. Invest Coach is an AI financial advisor shipped across iOS, Android, and web to millions of banking members, where a wrong answer at the wrong moment costs someone real money. My work is organized around one problem I've been thinking about for a decade: how to design systems where user trust tracks actual system trustworthiness rather than a performed impression of it. Read the press release.
“The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.” Marcus Aurelius
Is AI weakening our ability to think critically? I made a working prototype on the Anthropic API that classifies content across eight cognitive dimensions and recommends reading against specific cognitive gaps.
We launched crypto inside the same app where members bank, borrow, and invest stocks, becoming the first US bank to offer crypto. I built the holdings dashboard, the buy and sell flows, and asset-state patterns.
I started writing about AI product design, trust calibration, and design epistemology. AI moves fast. Slow Signal is where I think slow.
How do you reawaken a dress too fragile to wear? We used scent to bring 220 garments back to life at the Sleeping Beauties exhibition. I consulted on the visual treatment of the scent molecules and the layout of the olfactory pieces.
At the World Perfumery Congress in Geneva, I presented on digital olfaction in healthcare, focusing on breath biopsy as a non-invasive diagnostic. I met folks from around the world who are curious about scents.
Community speculative objects: new dating rings with real-time pheromone detection
Can we digitize our sense of smell? I founded Olfactronics, a community for the digital olfaction field. A gathering place for researchers, chemists, neuroscientists, and technologists working on scent as a computable medium.
Baby Maxwell loves to laugh and play.
Took parental leave from SoFi and focused on olfaction, my other practice.
Designed the next generation of SoFi's robo-advisor product, built in partnership with BlackRock and launched to millions of members. Led the end-to-end experience: onboarding, asset selection, account funding and activation, portfolio rebalancing, and ongoing maintenance.
As my first project at SoFi, I led the visual redesign of SoFi Invest. The work became the foundation for our official design system, bringing visual coherence across products that until then had each followed their own conventions.
Elliott and I got married at the city hall in Manhattan.
I moved back to New York to live with Elliott.
I co-founded a start-up with my friends. It was a diabetes management device that detected complications by smelling acetone in patients' breath. We were funded by Antler, based at New Lab, with research at USC's Loker Hydrocarbon Institute.
I survived the hills. San Francisco is such a beautiful city!
Designed a Sony-built projected table that turned the banker's private screen into a shared touch surface. The same information now sat between the banker and the client, who could both act on it directly instead of watching the banker drive a monitor.
Sorted clients by churn risk.
I redesigned the tools 10,000 JPMorgan branch bankers used daily. A single iPad dashboard that collapsed five disconnected systems (CRM, market data, pipeline, risk, communications) into one interface.
Hired by IDEO to work on some installations for the Museum of the Future in Dubai. My first collaboration with scent artist Sissel Tolaas, the start of a working relationship that continued through the Met Gala in 2024.
I took Bill Burnett and Dave Evans's Designing Your Life course at the Stanford d.school, then stayed on to help teach it. I was drawn to it because I believed in unusual paths over conventional ones. Their book sold over a million copies.
I co-founded Compass, A career discovery platform, with Peter Lowe out of South Park Commons. We were early to a problem AI has now made unavoidable: how do you choose a career based on your actual strengths instead of defaulting to the jobs your degree program funnels you toward.
Designed a new ATM for JPMorgan Lab 47. Customers could choose their bill denominations ($5, $20, $50) and log in through the mobile app instead of inserting a card. The first surface most customers actually touched at the bank, and it had not been rethought since the 1990s.
Named to BBC's 100 Women list, then invited to build products tackling the glass ceiling while they recorded my research and design process. We built four products including an AR app for assessing workplace culture during on-site interviews. The BBC documentary aired in 14 languages and reached over 400 million viewers.
[PLACEHOLDER: optional caption.]
I always wanted to experience living and working in Silicon Valley.
Designed the setup flow customers used to install the Nest thermostat out of the box, and the thermostat interface itself including the weather animations that played on the dial.
MoMA collaborates with emerging designers to add new objects to their stores. I designed a piece that locked saturated colors inside clear resin. Their theme was gifting and I was inspired by a Getty exhibition on historical gifting, where kings once gave each other rare pigments like sapphire and lapis.
For my MFA thesis, I built a suite of products to help people develop a more assertive language at work. A keyboard, a smart ring, and an app that worked together to log and analyze spoken and written workplace communication. Pre-GPT language augmentation.
At Tribeca Film Festival. Number 8 is me.
Joined Sagmeister & Walsh to help create The Happy Film, Stefan Sagmeister's documentary on happiness. Did prop design, graphic design, and everything in between. His Happiness exhibition was what made me want to work with him.
Helped design the post-scan experience for the museum's stylus that scanned objects during a visit. The goal was extending the visit through interactive tables where visitors made art from what they had scanned.
Designed an alarm clock that reminded students to go to sleep by yawning at them, making them yawn back. Student notable at Core77 Design Awards. That marks my entry to the world of hardware and robotics.
With my mom.
Graduated from York University in Toronto and started my MFA in product design at the School of Visual Arts.
Studio time on exchange at the Bauhaus.
Student exchange at the Bauhaus, learning that form follows attention, not function.
Transferred from physics and computer science into design at York University.
Won gold at the National Physics Olympiad.
Picking and sniffing roses in my grandmother's garden.
Reaching for the scent of things from the start.