University of Michigan - School of Information

University of Michigan - College of Engineering

ॐ शांति प्यार The Art of Liberation: How do we live abundantly as our truest and highest selves?

Los Angeles, California, United States

We honor the Tongva Land we are on and share offerings in Food, Yoga, Art and Sovereign Web Presence with you so we may all live in abundance, aligned with our highest and truest Infinite Self, for a New World rooted in the Divine Energies of Peace, Love, Joy, Balance and Gratitude. Please see <a href="https://natarajg.space">https://natarajg.space</a> for how we may connect.

Master Nataraj G

Maker

Wrote, directed and edited a narrative short film, Making a Mark, alongside a cast and crew of 18.Created interactive digital content for musicians including photography, video, animation and custom software development. Artists include Lord Huron, Neel Agrawal, Saraswathi Jones, Brett Farkas, We Are The West and The Shenkar.Shot, produced and distributed video of a graduate-level Cultural Intelligence study abroad trip to Guatemala exploring how to establish respectful, sustainable and mutually beneficial relationships.

Freelance

Filmmaker & Interactive Technologist

Co-founded Decolonize Daily, an organization that supports grassroots activist organizations in coordinating and executing campaigns through providing services in education, media and technology.Designing and developing a film project as well as a mobile application that brings together art, music, film and tech to educate and inspire folks to take action every day in alignment with longstanding social movements such as Indigenous Sovereignty, Black Lives Matter and Climate Justice to create a more peaceful, loving and harmonious society together.Skills & Environment: Community Building, Ethnographic Research, Mobile-First Design, Sketching, Graphic Design, Rapid Prototyping with Sketch, InVision, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, React Native (iOS, Android) and Firebase using Atom editor and GitHub code management.

Decolonize Daily

Creative Director, Co-Founder

Directed online presence and media for the African Drumming Laws project to understand how and why the British colonial government controlled and criminalized drumming in native African communities.Collaborated with Neel Agrawal and the Harvard Law Library's Innovation Lab to design and develop the African Drumming Laws Explorer: an interactive map-based application to visualize and browse drums, laws and regions.Produced a video in collaboration with the LA Law Library and UCLA Ethnomusicology department introducing the project to the ethnomusicology, West African, legal and broader research communities.Skills & Environment: Goal Directed Design, User Interviews, Personas, Scenarios, Sketching, Wireframing, Graphic Design, Rapid Prototyping with Adobe Experience Design, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Mapbox, React and Firebase using Atom editor and GitHub code management.

The Revolutionaries

Director of Design & Engineering, Founder

Developed and tested HelloTech's Agent App so technicians can use their phones to accept, record, process and manage jobs while out in the field educating customers and addressing technology challenges, including areas they may not have cellular or wi-fi service (offline mode).Implemented the Agent App using the Meteor platform so we could use HTML, JavaScript and CSS to deploy a single mobile app to both iOS and Android devices.Set up and managed virtual servers to handle various development and testing tasks using routing and hosting services through Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, respectively.Used Linux command-line tools to search and replace text across thousands of files as part of merging two disparate web applications into one.Skills & Environment: User Interviews, Usability Testing, Adobe Photoshop, Sketch, HTML5, CSS3, LESS, JavaScript, Meteor, MongoDB, Cordova, iOS + Android deployment and testing, Git, GitHub, WebStorm IDE on Mac OS X.

HelloTech Inc.

User Experience Engineer

Lead a User Experience Design course for students seeking to start a career in user experiencedesign or bring user experience design skills into their current work or entrepreneurial ventures.Guided five student groups through a Lean UX process to produce designs and interactive prototypes for mobile applications to build social action communities, address pollution in LA, explore the diverse history of important LA landmarks and share live concert experiences.Skills & Environment: Lean UX, Goal Directed Design, User Interviews, Personas, Scenarios, Sketching, Rapid Prototyping, Information Architecture, Content Strategy, Workflow Modeling, Mobile First Design, Responsive Design, Presenting Designs, Principles of Good Design, Wireframing, Usability Testing, Heuristic Analysis, Design Tools: Sketch, InVision, Axure RP, UX Pin.

General Assembly

User Experience Design Instructor

Consulted on mobile, responsive web and intranet projects for clients including Microsoft, BoeingEmployees Credit Union and Premera Blue Cross using a “Discover, Design, Deliver” UX approach.Skills & Environment: User Interviews, User Observation, Personas, Workflow Modeling, Scenarios, MS SharePoint, Axure RP, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Bootstrap, D3, Node, Express, Usability Testing.

Slalom Consulting

User Experience Designer, Web/Mobile Developer

Reduced the cost of higher education while increasing student learning outcomes with Highlighter's self-publishing platform for higher education instructors and students.Managed our technical team of four, user experience design, software architecture and engineering.Redesigned our product based on usage data, analytics, user research and comparative analysis.Architected the redesign using modern technologies (Node, Express, MongoDB, Backbone, CoffeeScript) and established trainings for the team to learn the new tech using CodeSchool.

Highlighter

Chief Technology Officer

Built dynamic, modular, single-page interfaces using jQuery, HTML, CSS & AJAX for users to manage their personal content collections, their group and course memberships, sharing and privacy permissions for groups all within the Sakai Open Academic Environment, an open-source learning management system used by hundreds of universities around the world.Authored the initial version of the Sakai OAE Widget Standard Development Kit (SDK).

Sakai Foundation

User Interface Developer

Made it easy for anyone to know where their food comes from by leading experience design andfront-end engineering for, Real Time Farms, an online, user-generated, nationwide food guide.Redesigned and user-tested the home page so that visitors left Real Time Farms with a clear understanding of what the service does and how they could use it.Designed and built the interface for a map-based browsing experience to trace food sources by virtually delving into the food web near any US zip code.Designed and built a dynamic form interface to make it easy and error-free to enter complex data about certifications and growing practices for various food items.Designed, built and A/B tested marketing pages to clearly express Real Time Farms’ value to customers and earn more conversions.Conducted user research at farmers markets and restaurants to learn more about the goals, context and tasks of the various communities that benefit from Real Time Farms tools and services.Contributed to our co-founder’s presentation about the importance of food transparency and how Real Time Farms can help at TEDxManhattan, 2012.

Real Time Farms

Design & Front-end Engineering, Founding Member

Organized a multi-institutional, goal-directed design effort to integrate library resources with Sakai 3, a next generation collaboration and learning environment, to provide users with a better experience in finding, using and sharing licensed scholarly content.Enabled the collections development office to make smarter purchasing decisions by designing and developing an online tool that filters, sorts and visualizes all the textbooks in use around campus.Managed a team of three graduate student interns at the University of Michigan and a distributed team of about 15 educational technologists from Indiana University, Mount Holyoke College, NYU, Stanford, Tufts, UC Berkeley, Yale and more.

University of Michigan Library

Interaction Designer

Enabled learning communities to incorporate course-relevant web content by designing and developing the CloudSocial dock, an interactive layer of socially-enabled learning tools that can be placed on any web page.Provided teachers, learners, learning tool developers and content providers with interfaces to manage CloudSocial learning tools, courses, content and security settings.

CloudSocial

Interaction Designer & Web Developer

Co-founded Troubadour Mobile, a mobile social networking startup, to connect people in new ways.Designed iPhone apps: Let’s Pizza! allows people to share pizza with neighbors; Let’s Meet! allows people to set up meeting locations; Let’s Draw! allows people to draw together with friends.Developed Let’s Pizza!, conducted usability testing and created monetization and marketing plans.

Troubadour Mobile, Inc

iOS Design & Engineering, Co-founder

Built the Citations Helper plugin for the Sakai Learning Management System using Java Enterprise technologies (J2EE), JavaScript and AJAX enabling thousands of students, teachers, librarians and researchers at universities all over the world to search and import articles from licensed databases and Google Scholar into assignments, syllabi, research guides and other documents.Published articles and diagrams on the project wiki for an audience of educators and technologists. Organized and lead Sakai conference sessions worldwide (Vancouver, Atlanta, Amsterdam, Paris).

University of Michigan Library - Sakaibrary Project

Application Programmer/Analyst Intermediate

Completed J2EE training and certification: Sun Certified Java Programmer (SCJP) and Sun Certified Web Component Developer (SCWCD).Built and programmed LEGO Mindstorms robots with custom Java software to demonstrate the company's innovative approach at conferences and presentations.

Symbiosis International

Software Engineer

Completed intensive enterprise Java web product training over the entire software development life-cycle: design, development, testing, deployment and maintenance.