Charles Buchwald

Work

Selected case studies.

Each opens with the problem and what I owned, then walks through the decisions and what changed during the work.

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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