Making possibilities tangible

A good question can change the direction of a project. A well-chosen story can help a roomful of people see something they’ve been talking past for months.

I make ideas tangible so people can reason about them together. That might take a whiteboard sketch, a customer conversation, a working prototype, or a short film showing a future that doesn’t exist yet. Colleagues will tell you I’m usually ready with a metaphor. Occasionally, there’s a parable.

The medium depends on what we need to understand. The purpose stays consistent: surface assumptions, explore possibilities, and give people enough shared understanding to make a good decision.

Then comes the work of making it happen. That includes building capability, changing how teams collaborate, and creating the conditions for good decisions to continue after the project ends.

Some things I’ve accomplished

At Bank of America, I led a long-term digital banking vision grounded in research into people’s financial lives. We built an evolving prototype environment to explore and test that future. The work influenced product direction and platform investment for more than a decade.

At Wells Fargo, I led design teams and helped redesign the way design, development, and testing teams worked together. Replacing sprawling specifications with connected, clearly owned information helped reduce project ramp-up time by 80% and build-phase ambiguities by 70%.

Later work brought together future-facing strategy, live-action concept films, physical prototypes, and an enterprise journey-mapping program. Across those efforts, I’ve helped teams see beyond individual products to the larger experience—and the organizational choices shaping it.

What has my attention now

AI is giving me plenty of new questions. I’m working on launching a chatbot, negotiating a book deal, and developing a practical AI course from what I’m learning firsthand.

I’m also researching how people adopt AI and how it affects them emotionally. What makes it useful? What makes it unsettling? How does it change their sense of competence, trust, or control? Those questions matter as much as what the technology can do.

Away from the screen—or sometimes connected to it—I’m still tinkering with physical prototypes and connected objects. Storytelling remains a constant, whether I’m working with words, imagery, or data.

I’m enjoying being back at the cutting edge and the hands-on work that makes it concrete. There’s often something you only discover when you try to build the thing.

A little more Joe

Earlier chapters included captaining sailing yachts, professional photography, teaching interactive design, and building things in the early days of multimedia and the web. Curiosity has carried me through a fairly varied working life.

I like working with people who care about what they’re making and are willing to question how they’re making it. I take people’s time seriously. I enjoy a difficult question, especially when we can put something on the table and start figuring it out together.