<aside> ⭐ Bennett is a senior majoring in Information Systems and HCI at CMU who has had plenty of professional experiences, including working as a UX/UI Designer at BookLive; a UX Intern at Mastercard, Samsung Electronics, and NASA; a designer at NOVID; and as the technical lead of the design team for MoonRanger.

</aside>

📌 How did you first get involved in HCI?

I started working at a startup accelerator, where I had an opportunity to work on an app for a music startup there to help freelancers better manage their gigs and get paid smoothly, so, I had a lot of room to take ownership over the design of the app and then start coding it.

📌 How do you view the design side of HCI compared to the tech side of HCI, and how do you leverage your skills in both areas?

Coding in Design

I’ve used my coding experience in pretty much every job I've had since a lot of it has to do with knowing different conventions and standards that are important as a designer to hand off to somebody who's going to be coding it.

Design in Coding

And I think vice versa if you're someone more into code, having an idea of how a designer operates, like what kind of resources and assets they have access to along with what they can potentially provide me is also very helpful. So I think they go hand in hand.

An Example

It has been very helpful having experiences with both sides in the last few jobs I've had, like working on the contact tracing app (NOVID), and if you're in a startup, you might be expected to help code. I've also been recently working at NASA as a designer, and they've asked me to start coding stuff a lot of the time because they're very under-resourced in that sense.

📌  What are some courses that drove you to HCI and how did your skills improve because of them?

Design of AI Products & Services - John Zimmerman & Jodi Forlizzi

I was able to work with many master’s students, and because a lot of master's students are transitioning into the field and they've also been working in a professional environment for a while, it's different working with them.

You know, like, you can look up YouTube tutorials for some things when it comes to design or hard skills. But, in this class, I was somewhat forced to learn more of that on my own like, how do you design AI products and services? Like, what are the challenges in the field right now? A lot of those products and services don't exist, so like, how do you come up with them in the first place? And what might that look like? A lot of those questions, were really, really cool to answer and with people that I would have never worked with, like you know, 10 years older than myself.

📌 What are your thought processes/motivations behind pinpointing a particular topic to work on in a certain project?

For me, my first ever project was a portfolio or just a personal website, not even a portfolio. Then, I think I started making different things, like some clocks and calculators, just having practice and seeing what other people do. For websites, it was to redesign, like trying to recreate a website or two; those are things that were easy to start off with. Then, I started seeing more and more interesting things. And for me, right now, it's more like, whatever I find being the most high impact on people.