CWIT Talks - AI in Research & Product Design

Karolina Whitmore is a Staff Product Designer at TELUS Digital with over experience across experiential, packaging, and digital design. Her background spans designing wayfinding for schools and hospitals, designing packaging for a PepsiCo CPG brand, and ultimately finding her way to product design at WillowTree (now TELUS Digital), where she has spent the past nearly seven years. Today, she uses AI to bridge design and engineering by moving beyond siloed Figma workflows and building directly in the codebase alongside engineers. Originally from Estonia, Karolina enjoys homesteading with her family and tending to their 20 or so chickens.

Katie Krol, Ph.D. is a Senior Product Researcher at TELUS Digital with experience investigating human behavior across psychology, neuroscience, and UX. After an academic research career spanning labs and degrees in the US, the UK, and Germany, she pivoted to product and user research in 2022 and has not looked back, forever driven by scientific curiosity in how we perceive, navigate, and interact with the world around us. Most recently, she led a fellowship for the Data and AI Research Team (DART) to define a user-centric vision for AI interfaces in 2030. Katie then leveraged the AI coding tool Cursor to act as her own designer and engineer—building a live, interactive dashboard to interact with the findings from this work, which she’ll share in this talk. Katie lives in Charlottesville with her husband and two cats, and can be found most days watching Star Trek or Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

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