UC Santa Barbara

University of Colorado Boulder

Design Leadership // Mindfulness

I teach design and technology at the University of Colorado Boulder, College of Engineering and Applied Science. My focus is communicating best practices in the domains of Art Direction and Product Design.

ATLAS Institute at CU Boulder

Adjunct Professor

I have been a meditator for 30+ years and an instructor for 9. I have also been a technologist and design director for over a decade. I am in the rare position of possessing intimate insight into the challenge of maintaining an engaged meditation practice while maintaining full-time employment. 

Trained in modern contemplative methods, my teaching orientation includes facilitating clinical and heart-centered methods of contemplation.

I present meditation as a simple, secular, and humanistic approach to cultivating well-being. No spiritual affiliation or previous experience is necessary to start sitting.

The Field Meditation

Meditation Coach

I am working with the LinkedIn accessibility and inclusive design team to identify and support initiatives that transform the way the Product Design team delivers value to partners and stakeholders. 

I partner with Product Designers and Design Operations Managers to discover insights and drive processes that will improve file handoff and design collaboration with the engineering teams.

I collaborate and lead ideation workshops and qualitative research with internal teams. To validate and distribute findings I create user journey & system maps, service architecture diagrams, user flow diagrams, and prototypes for my colleagues.

LinkedIn

Product Designer

Product design lead for Apple Design Award-winning markup notetaking app created by Shiny Frog software. I was responsible for product design flows, UX prototyping, and visual design for iOS and macOS. The progressively-minded team was distributed across three continents and seamlessly created world-class design, marketing, and sales outreach.

Bear App

Principal Product Designer

My TEDx talk was entitled: "Stop Meditating and Start Being Present" - I examined how our productivity-focused society and tech culture prioritizes output over awareness. A byproduct of this attitude is the conflation of meditation practices with ‘self-optimization’.

Instead of adding more to our self-improvement to-do list, we can instead regard meditation as a tool that reveals our immediate experience - discomfort and all - as a reliable source of well-being and problem-solving.

TEDxBoulder

Speaker

I initiated Gloo's design team’s effort to define a new brand and implement it across the company’s suite of software products. I was responsible for mentoring a team of UX and marketing designers through the brand transition and helped establish workflows that anchor into a global design system. I constructed a tool stack that took advantage of Sketch, Abstract, and Material's robust documentation. The tooling was seamlessly integrated into a React front-end environment. Our daily praxis was inception, research, wireframes, prototypes, UI polish, and integration with engineering.

Gloo

I had the excellent fortune of working with Amandine, Kelly Boys, Rick Hanson, and Catherine Cook-Cottone to produce a curriculum that teaches mindfulness and the cultivation of inner resources during challenging UN Peacekeeper deployments. I am a long-time meditator and working with this esteemed group of teachers was educational and inspiring.

lululemon

Creative Director

Peter is a technologist, designer, maker, and thinker. Peter tailors custom design solutions that are an authentic expression of your vision. I romp at the crossroads of critical thinking, beauty, and functionality.  Your success is my greatest wish.

Studio: Peter McEwen

Design Leadership

I helped Pivotal Labs build their product design practice in the Rocky Mountain region. I educated and worked with agile teams on the synthesis of art direction and product design. I was expected to be conversant with all modern design and prototyping tools, possess a keen understanding of UX / UI principles and manage the design process from inception to launch.

Pivotal Software, Inc.

Product Design Lead

I managed a team of designers and developers specializing in application design, mobile applications, development, and DevOps. 

dojo4  builds well-crafted software, interfaces, and also generated content for startups and social impact enterprises for organizations like Twitter and Greenpeace.

Dojo4, LLC

I worked as an interactive developer, interface designer, and product designer. I cut my teeth on early expressions of Ruby on Rails applications and learned my way around the command line. At Vermilion the work drives natural products forward, sparks action for nonprofits, and elevates educational design. A wonderful opportunity to work for some great brands!