Kevin Penner

Patch helps you consider impulse purchases and understand the lifecycle of fast fashion. As the team’s Project Manager, I organized and led brainstorms, guided overall direction and team dynamics; I also wore the hats of a UX designer and researcher during early development, a brand designer to cement our image and vision, and a full stack engineer when we built our Chrome extension. Awarded “Best Concept” for our final presentation.

My team developed Wynd based on our own struggles with proper sleep as students. A WatchOS app, it used evidence-driven methods to encourage sustainable sleeping habits. I led team meetings, coordinated individual responsibilities, and spearheaded wireframing and UI development, as well as participating as a product designer throughout the design cycle.

As the product manager on a capstone team of four, I led the development of the aura desk lamp and a brand image for the team, an exercise in industrial design expanded to cover user research, brand management, and designing for mass manufacturing. In the process, I learned about the challenges of coordinating a remote team, attempting to go to market on a short time frame, and crafting a brand identity to engage and inspire potential users.

Umbrellievable was a deep dive into the business aspects of product design. After competitive benchmarking and writing user personas to identify the utility of different features, we designed our own umbrella. This included an engineering model for the joints, a manufacturing cost model, and a business strategy including market analysis, growth projections based on consumer surveys, and a profit and loss model.

Milestone was intended to facilitate the coordination of events from birthdays to graduations. Near the start of the pandemic, we noticed that many friends' birthday plans were thrown into disarray. After more interviews, we started designing a unified interface to simplify the necessary discussions and decisions. In the process, I led my team’s user research efforts, laid out a prototyping plan, and helped create wireframes and prototypes to test different aspects of our designs.

grassLab was the result of months of in-depth user research. Alongside a team of four, I interviewed stakeholders throughout the legal cannabis industry, synthesized the results, and developed solutions to address the needs we found. We started prototyping an educational exhibit with pop-ups around campus, but were cut short by the pandemic.

Despite enjoying experimenting with Arduino units, I felt restricted to my dorm room or a classroom because of how unwieldy circuits could be. As a result, I designed and built the BreadBox, a portable breadboarding alternative. In doing so, I learned about designing sheet metal parts, prototyping, testing, and refining my design, and core machine shop skills including turning, milling, casting, and welding.