Design Leadership in Aerospace

Process | Co-Designing

Sketch with users, in their language, on their problems.

In a past example, test engineers were combing through hundreds of .csv files to verify connector pin compliance on spacecraft hardware, with hundreds of pins per connector and a tight schedule. I offered to co-design a solution. We sketched the dashboard together, they guided the design from their workflow, and since they spoke Python fluently, I built the tool in libraries matching their technical language. Mapping the pin data spatially revealed what spreadsheets had hidden: clusters of failed pins showed connectors being rotated out of sockets instead of pulled axially. A co-designed visualization surfaced a mechanical root cause.

The tool also exercised speculative design. The systems engineer knew three or four more payload instruments were coming over the next few years, so we designed for that future together: modular data structures, dropdown menus to register new payload IDs. Not just solving today's problem, but envisioning with the user what the tool becomes.

Previously, at Boeing, I co-designed a payload scheduling system producing the uplink products the flight system needed to achieve mission objectives while maintaining safety. It passed all testing and became part of the operational workflow. Same principle: sit with the operators, learn their sequencing logic, build something they can reason about and trust.

At JPL, I've pushed this into practice as ritual: asking flight operators to teach their on-console workflows, bringing design colleagues into the mission operations room to feel the wins and frustrations firsthand, and routing empathy maps and heuristic evaluations back to software teams as concrete opportunities.

Process | Influence Without Positional Authority

Design as a leadership tool in engineering culture.

In organizations where PowerPoint is the lingua franca, design skills become a quiet superpower. I solve high-stakes problems with visual metaphors and persuasive graphics: flowcharts for operational modes, spatial diagrams for requirements traceability, a Punnett square to explain capability against user adoption. Leaders have told me these visuals changed how they understood the problem, and some went on to influence training material at tradecraft schools.

In weekly engineering staff meetings, I introduce Gestalt principles to colleagues who've never encountered them, showing how grouping, proximity, and contrast shape data storytelling for the next review milestone. What looks like a minor presentation nit, a color clashing with a background, is often an accessibility compliance issue. I make that case every time.

Influence also requires an entourage. Championing a concept without positional authority means growing a sphere of supporters: get one leader to believe in it and momentum follows. I've prepared joint-organization briefings at director level, guided senior officers to champion topics through risk boards and review panels, and watched one persistent issue activate multi-agency studies, an RFI to industry, and prototype development, growing from a working-group concern into a high-pursuit problem.

Process | Evangelizing AI as a Design Tool

I serve on a steering committee exploring AI and design integration across the organization. Within my team, I run vibe-coding demos and hack sprints, teaching colleagues current workflows and showing how they apply to our domain. The most effective move: revisiting a past analysis with an AI-assisted approach and arriving at new insights, making the value concrete rather than theoretical. I've also presented to the broader human-centered design group on campus to spark collaborations and grow the network.

The through-line is AI as a sensemaking tool, never a replacement for human judgment, across sensor data, complex system states, and operational decisions.