answers

In 2002 I needed an online portfolio—and the way to do that at the time, was creating one’s own website. I wasn’t keen on turning my name into a URL for just career things, and my ninavizz handle hadn’t happened yet.

My dad’s birthday card to me that year had a photo of myself as a toddler inside; seated upright in a determined posture on my just-broken mini-bigwheel, looking down at its front tire as it lay on its side next to me with a giant smile on my face. I have no idea why he picked that one image for my card that year, but it summed-up how I was feeling in that moment. The bigwheel.net domain was also available, and that sealed the deal.

I still like it: it’s playful, it speaks to that first device that brought a sense of adventure, agency, and independence to so many of us; or at least, that’s my memory of my bigwheel.

No, I was probably not the first person to create the fruit-slice smiley face; but I did proudly design Slicey and Nonny when I was at Yahoo!, working on their platform team a million years ago. So, yes, the joyful little pink smiley ready to say something, does have a unique meaning to me. And, who doesn’t love smileys?!

Absolutely! It took a lot of tuning, but Claude rocked it. 🙂
My colorist, Nicola Corl, gets all the credit for the “unicorn” coloring motif, on an aside. I just wish I were more diligent about keeping it up-to-date.

BTW: The WebGL animation is sooooo much prettier and gentler, in Firefox. Chrome is just such a sloth, sometimes. No offense to the cute ‘lil critters.

Honestly, this answer will change over the next quarter. Claude Design didn’t even exist 2 months before this writing, and I’ve been having an absolute gas with it over the past month. Before that, I mostly used Copilot and Gemini for research synthesis and analysis. Figma Make couldn’t work with our non-React based design system at HashiCorp; and MCP crashed my machine when I tried using it for a workshop canvas of +100 identically styled issue tickets. Gemini and NotebookLM rocked at producing the content for those tickets. Lots of promise, just real limits.

I also prefer the aesthetics, quality, and craft of TIG welds, but a MIG rig is way cheaper and much easier to use for infrequent personal projects. I look at AI, similarly. Every SaaS product had to slap a chat window on their UI, in the past few years. We can do so much better. AI should save toil for users, not create more work in new places. That’s the design challenge that right now does have me honestly excited—the bar hasn’t been set for integrating AI well. The hype makes that gap even more visible.

My own bar for craft is high, and whichever tool for whichever challenge can get me solutioning with the least brain-to-execution friction and the most efficiency, I am here to use.

As a practice, yes. As a stand-alone project or deliverable—that’s not Design Thinking.

In 18+ years of product design, I’ve encountered enough divergent interpretations of the term that I prefer to speak in more consistently understood language: stakeholder partnership, inquiry-based empathy, user-centered design decisions, and co-design as process.

Human-centered design (HCD) is the approach I most closely align with—Design Thinking is considered an extension of it, and HCD tends to be understood more consistently as a practice rather than an activity.

Some context: Design Thinking gained mainstream traction after I finished college, with IDEO, Frog, and others becoming rock stars of “innovation theater.” The external consultancy model created real pressure to package inquiry-led design and collaborative processes as a premium-priced methodology. I get it—selling design is hard. But I never saw my craft as a white-glove service. I have a shovel and a chisel, not a cape. Collaborative process with stakeholders and users is just how I work—mostly because it’s more fun, but also because it produces better outcomes. Qualifying that with a label like “Design Thinking” feels pretentious. I could also just be a Midwestern curmudgeon about anything that fancy-sounding.

This MIT Technology Review piece puts it well.

I am! http://www.linkedin.com/in/ninavizz

Most of my social media stuff is personal. I locked my Twitter & deleted most of my Tweets after the emotional creepy guy took it over, so now I toot over in the fediverse—mostly about social justice and activism things.

My Instagram and Facebook are both private, and purely personal spaces for me. I’m “friends” with many colleagues and past co-workers, but prefer to keep my work and private life separate with current endeavors. I’m also unlikely to unlock either, now that both are being scraped to train AI.

I lived in the Bay Area for almost 25 years. It’s a cliché, but I did leave a big piece of my heart in San Francisco. I’m just not a fan of what the City—or really, the entire region from Marin to Watsonville—has turned into in recent years. Living in the middle of that made me angry and anxious. Having since left, its become a lot easier to love it again; and love is a good thing I don’t like to mess with. 🙂

I do enjoy frequent travel, and have traveled weekly (for months at a time) up and down the West Coast for past projects.

Sidenote: I’ve got these cuties and snow, just outside my bedroom window here in Oregon—how ya gonna top that, Bay Area?

Yes! https://bigwheel.net/OldBWN/portfolio_09/YHOO09_001.html

I did! It was an amazing moment. Ask me about it, sometime!