10 Things You Should Know About Me
December 2018 Edition
I am a designer.
My background is interaction design.
My current role is user experience design.
I focus towards design strategy.
I have an interest in designing how we design (how we work), which I recently learned has a name: design ops.
I am creative, curious, and driven. I ran an experiment earlier this year to find out what words people would use to describe me when I’m not in the room. I analyzed the results and “Creative” “Curious” and “Driven” were my top three as chosen by my past and current co-workers.
I ask a lot of questions. Constantly. It’s the baseline for how I work. It’s how I gather knowledge to synthesize, it’s how I collaborate with others, and it’s how I get everyone on the same page about what questions we should be asking.
I recently was musing about how the user experience profession is all about asking and answering questions. Furthermore, that answering questions is a science, and asking questions is an art. You can methodically answer questions, but knowing which questions to ask takes practice, just like art.
If I were a machine, I’d be a Carbon 3D Printer, because of the way it pulls something meaningful out of the ambiguous goo. Thanks to Shashi Jain for this machine analogy insight!
This is my mom. She passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2011, three years after I captured this moment of pure joy. Her death has had a profound effect on my life, especially when it comes to the value of time.
We only have so much time on this Earth, I want to spend mine meaningfully.
On the same token, it’s my responsibility as a designer to make sure we respect people’s time with the products and services we create.
Now for something fun after all that serious stuff. Two of these statements are true, and one is false. Guess which one is the lie:
A) I built virtual reality experiments for a psychology lab.
B) I moved to Portland to get a hedgehog.
C) I dislocated my shoulder snowboarding on a bunny hill.
No cheating! Scroll down for the answers in…
3…
2…
1…
I built the world’s first 3DOF VR Controller! Okay, maybe not the world’s first, but I did have to build something from scratch using infrared LED’s on a stick attached to a remote presentation mouse. This allowed two people in the same VR environment to point at dominos to select them for a game made specifically for a psychology experiment back in 2006. That’s my mom and dad by the way, trying it out before my graduation ceremony.
The second truth: the final deciding factor for my move to Portland was that I could get a pet hedgehog. Hedgehogs are considered exotic pets, and hence illegal in California, so I chose the job offer in PDX instead! Niko the hedgehog passed away a few years ago so he’s no longer with us.
Note: When doing Two Truths and and a Lie as an icebreaker in person, it’s much easier to own a lie if it has some truth to it. It was my friend who dislocated his shoulder on the bunny hill that we were on together!
One last thing… I’m also a co-founder. I have a side project completely unrelated to technology, called Closet Minimal. Our goal is to simplify your life so you can focus on what’s important, starting with what you wear everyday as your go-to outfit. I wrote about my current go-to designer outfit on our blog.
Closing with a pun: I’m Finnish (Finn), and this is the end (Fin). 👏👏👏👏
Orignal Slides
This was originally created as a “Pecha Kucha” for my fellow designers and researchers in the newly formed Experience Centered Design organization at Intel. The format was to introduce yourself in 10 slides, 10 seconds each.
Saara Kamppari-Miller
Design Strategy, User Experience Design, Interaction Design
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