Selected work
Senior design at the seam of product and engineering.
User advocacy as institutional discipline.
I have spent my career working where design, engineering, and product meet. As that triad collapses into converged roles, my thesis is that one piece of the work doesn’t go away — keeping the user’s seat warm in rooms where product reps the business and engineering reps the technology. Most recently I was a designated AI Champion at U.S. Bank, embedded inside the Product organization, leading the team that compressed a 30-year-old fleet-management product’s UI/UX modernization roadmap from ten years to three.
Featured work
Three case studies
Each opens with the problem and what I owned, then walks through the decisions and what changed during the work. “More context” expanders let you go deeper without cluttering the page.
Voyager — A 30-year-old fleet-management product, modernized in 3 years instead of 10
From 2023–2024 I led the design team on the overhaul of U.S. Bank's **Voyager** suite, including **Fleet Commander Online** — the 30-year-old product Fleet Managers use to handle fuel purchases and inform operations across commercial fleets. When I arrived, the UI/UX modernization roadmap was scheduled to take ten years. Over the next two years, my team and I changed that to three, while keeping a live, regulated product running for expert users.
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U.S. Bank Design Ethics — community, not committee
Founding and leading a Design Ethics community of practice inside one of the country's largest enterprise design organizations. I ran the group **alongside my formal role** — the org sponsored the work, but it was never part of my job description beyond "build community." The group ran for three years (two under my direct leadership), reached about a quarter of the design org directly and all of it indirectly, and produced a Designers' Code of Ethics co-authored with **Rochelle Cherenfant** in partnership with the bank's Global Ethics Office. When a corporate reorganization shut the group down, participants restarted it independently in 2024 — without being asked.
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CIMMYT — A 50th-anniversary museum that had to do three jobs at once
A 200-square-meter museum and visitor center for the **International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center**, opened on a hard deadline tied to CIMMYT's 50th-anniversary celebration. The brief asked for three things in the same physical space — visitor center, institutional museum, and a high-tech VIP environment for prospective donors. We built it as a single facility with multiple modes, and open-sourced the back-room software so CIMMYT would never depend on a vendor for the platform.
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Pullout · Systems thinking
The same design × engineering × product instinct shows up at West Publishing (now Thomson Reuters) — work in 40% of budgeted time — and at Kavouras, where a $30,000/month vendor problem dissolved in a day. Pattern, not novelty.
Read the pullout →
Capabilities
What I can do for an organization.
Designer at the product–engineering seam
A career of senior design work at the meeting point of design, product, and engineering — most recently embedded inside U.S. Bank's Product organization rather than the Design org proper. The position is a tool for advancing the user's interests at strategy and planning tables most designers don't get into.
User advocacy as institutional discipline
The design × engineering × product triad is collapsing, but the user-advocate seat doesn't go away — it gets more important. Founded U.S. Bank's Design Ethics community of practice; co-authored its Designers' Code of Ethics; designated AI Champion; carried responsible AI, behavioral design, and data governance into everyday peer-review practice.
Systems thinking across physical and digital
Digital product work in the enterprise, plus running Museografica — a binational firm shipping interactive exhibits across North America and Mexico. The fluency isn't a generalist's badge; it's the same engineering-meets-design instinct that compressed Voyager from 10 years to 3 and saved $30,000/month at Kavouras.
Ask about my work
A small AI layer that answers from approved sources only.
It will not speculate, will not fill in unstated experience, and will tell you when the evidence is thin. Try:
- “What did Charles do on Voyager that compressed the roadmap from 10 years to 3?”
- “How did the U.S. Bank Design Ethics group survive a reorg?”
- “Where does Charles's engineering background show up in his digital work?”
- “What is Charles's POV on senior design as the design / product / engineering triad collapses?”