Hi, I'm Kimberly

I'm a design strategist, researcher, and creative technologist at New Deal Design in San Francisco. I study how people live and work, then build prototypes to test ideas.

Recently I led a 30-session research program for an AI wearable, from the first interviews through testing five physical prototypes. My analysis shaped the final recommendation. On the creative technology side, I built a game for SF Design Week that turned visitors' phones into motion controllers. It's part of my ongoing work treating interaction primitives (tilts, shakes, swipes) as a design material.

Before this I spent five years as a licensed landscape architect, working on plazas, campus plans, and stormwater systems in North Carolina. Then I did an MDes at Carnegie Mellon, where I built a drawing machine for students with motor disabilities, a kinetic installation of 100 robotic brooms, and a spatial audio project that became a paper at ACM TEI 2025.

Landscape architecture still shapes how I work. I start by watching how people actually use a place (I've counted pedestrians with a clipboard), and I'm used to designing things that have to survive weather, budgets, and public meetings.

I work in English and Spanish.