Hello, and welcome.

I’m Shawn, a Senior AI-Inspired Product Designer and Project Manager back from a year long sabbatical.

Empathy is where my design practice began. Not from textbooks, but from life—shaped by hardship, and lifted by rare acts of kindness. That lived experience guides how I design: with care, with curiosity, and with people at the center.

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence is revolutionizing product design, compressing methodologies and accelerating development cycles, creating both risks and opportunities.

I’m a cautiously optimistic senior product designer who champions a pragmatic design-to-dev lifecycle, thoughtfully integrating AI into classical workflows. I believe AI can enhance and accelerate Design Thinking without sacrificing empathy or the importance of content and human collaboration.

Fun stuff about me

My guiding principles

How I built this site

Vehicle Passport: A pet project for AI exploration

Not a finished, branded design but rather a scrappy, clickable MVP vibe-coded with Cursor + Claude Sonnet 4 (including Supabase user authentication). Time to complete ~6 days.

➤ Inspiration

For years it seems I’ve been encumbered by workflows, processes and tools that were imposed on me by clients, employers and cultures. This pet project gives me the freedom to explore new tools, techniques and technologies at my own pace.

➤ What is the Vehicle Passport

The Vehicle Passport concept hypothesizes that separating the vehicle trade-in funnel from the vehicle sales funnel, leveraging IoT and emerging technologies, will boost sales and improve customer satisfaction. After mulling the idea over with several deep research tools like Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Sjeel Koster’s ICP Architect agent, it seems like there’s a real world need.

➤ Process deep dive. It’s evolving quickly

Stage 1: User needs and business objectives

Continue reading →

Stage 2: Functional requirements and content specifications

Continue reading →

Stage 3: Information architecture and interaction design

Coming soon

Stage 4: User interface and navigation design

Coming soon

Stage 5: Visual design

Coming soon

Guiding Principles

I subscribe to the following definitions and beliefs.

“A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product or service. It’s not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.”

Marty Neumeier – The Brand Gap

“Experience Design is the design of anything, independent of medium and across media where human engagement is an explicit goal and human experience an explicit outcome.”

Jesse James Garrett

“If you don’t have time to do it right… when are you going to have time to do it over?”

John Wooden

“Enlightened trial and error succeeds over the planning of the lone genius.”

David Kelly – Founder, IDEO Labs

Guiding Principles

I subscribe to the following definitions and beliefs.

“A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product or service. It’s not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.”

Marty Neumeier – The Brand Gap

“Experience Design is the design of anything, independent of medium and across media where human engagement is an explicit goal and human experience an explicit outcome.”

Jesse James Garrett

“If you don’t have time to do it right… when are you going to have time to do it over?”

John Wooden

“Enlightened trial and error succeeds over the planning of the lone genius.”

David Kelly – Founder, IDEO Labs

Hello, and welcome.

I’m Shawn, a Senior AI-Inspired Product Designer and Project Manager back from a year long sabbatical.

Empathy is where my design practice began. Not from textbooks, but from life—shaped by hardship, and lifted by rare acts of kindness. That lived experience guides how I design: with care, with curiosity, and with people at the center.

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence is revolutionizing product design, compressing methodologies and accelerating development cycles, creating both risks and opportunities.

I’m a cautiously optimistic senior product designer who champions a pragmatic design-to-dev lifecycle, thoughtfully integrating AI into classical workflows. I believe AI can enhance and accelerate Design Thinking without sacrificing empathy or the importance of content and human collaboration.

Fun stuff about me

My guiding principles

How I built this site

Vehicle Passport: A pet project for AI exploration

Not a finished, branded design but rather a scrappy, clickable MVP vibe-coded with Cursor + Claude Sonnet 4 (including Supabase user authentication). Time to complete ~6 days.

➤ Inspiration

For years it seems I’ve been encumbered by workflows, processes and tools that were imposed on me by clients, employers and cultures. This pet project gives me the freedom to explore new tools, techniques and technologies at my own pace.

➤ What is the Vehicle Passport

➤ Process deep dive. It’s evolving quickly

Stage 1: User needs and business objectives

Stage 2: Functional requirements and content specifications

Stage 3: Information architecture and interaction design

Stage 4: User interface and navigation design

Stage 5: Visual design

Breaks are healthy

Hacking your personality is hard

Guiding Principles

“A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product or service. It’s not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.”

“Experience Design is the design of anything, independent of medium and across media where human engagement is an explicit goal and human experience an explicit outcome.”

“If you don’t have time to do it right… when are you going to have time to do it over?”

“Enlightened trial and error succeeds over the planning of the lone genius.”

Guiding Principles

“A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product or service. It’s not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.”

“Experience Design is the design of anything, independent of medium and across media where human engagement is an explicit goal and human experience an explicit outcome.”

“If you don’t have time to do it right… when are you going to have time to do it over?”

“Enlightened trial and error succeeds over the planning of the lone genius.”