Futurecasting 2026: A Series on the Future of Software Development
Six research artifacts, built with a team of five researchers, mapping what AI means for developer roles, the DevOps loop, and GitLab’s product strategy over the next several…
BEN @ WORK
I live at the intersection of user experience, design, and code. Passionately curious, never bored.
BEN @ WORK
I live at the intersection of user experience, design, and code. Passionately curious, never bored.
The Creation of an AI-integrated UX Research Library at GitLab
A live repository of 200+ GitLab research reports, with a research agent, a hypothesis validator, and semantic links out to customer quotes, support tickets, and sales calls. Context…
AI Onboarding Service Design Blueprint
Mapping the onboarding customer journey for GitLab Duo, from first awareness through ongoing feature use, to find out why onboarding was so painful and what to do about…
The Future of AI-Driven Code Review
A competitive and market analysis of the fast-emerging AI code review space, with strategic recommendations for where GitLab could move next. Done in Q1FY27, so by the time…
Creating an SDLC “Golden Journey” map for GitLab
Mapping the real, systems-level work developers do with GitLab, from first day onboarding all the way through deploying features. Context & Contributions GitLab is a single application that…
Agile Discovery & Delivery Toolkit
Releasing a toolkit for agile integration of research and design insights Context & Contributions This project was born out of the realization that our organization’s agile practice was…
Choosing a UX Research Method
A simple flowchart as an exercise in understanding Early in my time as a UX Researcher at Autodesk, there were only two of us on the team (there…
Cloud Platform Analytics
Laying a robust groundwork for platform analytics across an entire organization Context & Contributions Autodesk’s Cloud Platform (Forge) has several applications and services. Understanding how our customers work,…
The 10-Step Customer Research Lifecycle
Defining the UX research process for Autodesk’s Cloud Platform group Context & Contributions I was the second member of a two-person research team when I joined Autodesk’s cloud…
The Six Islands of Developer Experience
A meta-study to make three years of research understandable, important, and actionable Context & Contributions The main focus for this project was Autodesk’s cloud platform (Forge) and better…
Project Soli
Project Soli is a radar sensor platform enabling gestural interaction with embedded devices. I worked on the team for about 18 months as a UX researcher and prototyper.…
Photon SIK
The SparkFun Inventor’s Kit for Photon is an introductory Internet-of-Things experiment kit, with a Particle Photon compatible microcontroller, breadboard, and a variety of sensors. Along with other members…
Particle Photon Shields
As part of a taskforce investigating how SparkFun could support the Internet-of-Things, our group designed and released six add-on shields for the Particle (formerly Spark) Photon board. Of…
Makers in American Spaces — State Department Webcast Series
Over the past few months, I’ve been lucky enough to be invited by Kylie Peppler to participate in a couple of webcasts for the state department (the Bureau…
Jumbotron!
So, SparkFun has these awesome 32×32 RGB LED panels. They also have a cheap webcam and a powerful-enough microcontrollers (a Teensy 3.1 in this case) to potentially drive…
FabLearn 2014
At the FabLearn conference in Fall of 2014 I presented a paper called PopCad: Towards Paper-Based Fabrication Tools for Children, which illustrated some of the doctoral work I did on…
SparkFun Live: Self-Balancing Robots & MIP Teardown
A while back (like a LONG while back), I was on an episode of SparkFun Live (along with Dave Stillman) discussing self-balancing robots and doing a brief teardown…
SXSWEdu Panel
I was lucky enough to get my panel picked for SXSWEdu 2015, which happened this past March (yes, it’s taken me this long to update my website). The…
The SIKIO (SparkFun Inventor’s Kit for the IOIO Board)
About two years ago, Nate (SparkFun’s CEO) asked me if I thought it would be possible to interface the IOIO board with Processing. The IOIO is a great…
PopCAD (version 2)
In the second version of the PopCAD, we replaced the copper tape with conductive fabric tape, which can be laser cut. We carefully etched out a circuit on…
PopCAD (version 1)
PopCAD (version 1) is a paper-based 3D-input device for beginner-level 3D modeling. It connects to a piece of software to display different shapes in real-time based on the…
The Home Stretch
Last Wednesday, April 9th, I successfully defended my dissertation, entitled “Embodied Fabrication: Body-Centric Devices for Novice Designers”. Yay! Which means I will be updating this website again now…
Fabric Hacker Patch (with DIY.org)
SparkFun (with myself as the circuit designer) recently teamed up with DIY.org, a web community that encourages kids to gain skills in all sort of areas – from astronomy…
On the passing of Red Burns
I’m unsure of where to begin. I have many memories of Red, from when I was a young child running around ITP back when it was half the…
SnapCAD
SnapCAD is an extension of the ideas that started with the UCube – a tangible interface to aid beginners in modeling and designing for 3D digital fabrication tools…
MAKERBridge Broadcast: Physical Computing and Making
I was invited to be part of a broadcast Google Plus hangout hosted by MAKERBridge on the subjects of physical computing and making. It’s a nice hour-long discussion…
In case you missed today’s broadcast from the Institute of Play…
Here’s the link to the archived version of the panel discussion I participated in this morning (along with awesome people like Don Miller, Kylie Peppler, Syed Salahuddin, and…
I’ll be live on the interwebs this Wednesday!
I’ve been invited by the Institute of Play in NYC to be on a live-over-the-internet panel discussion of why DIY tinkering and physical computing is important for children:…
Video from Invited Talk at Georgia Tech
If, for some reason, you want to watch me talk for an hour, here’s a link to the lecture I gave at Georgia Tech as part of the…
UCube at the Denver Art Museum
A while back (July 2012), the Craft Technology Lab, including myself, presented work at the Denver Art Museum as part of Untitled #49: Ideate, one in a series of…
Evaluating Accessibility in Fabrication Tools for Children | DIYAbility
My colleagues John Schimmel (of DIYAbility and NYU’s ITP), Jaymes Dec (of Marymount School, formerly of GreenFab), and I are putting on a workshop as part of the…
Inventory · GitHub
After several years and many requests, I have finally put up the code for the Equipment Inventory System I wrote for Eyebeam back in 2007 or so. I…