Kevin Lynagh

I’m a designer specializing in user interfaces for complex systems.

Keming Labs is my consulting firm, with clients in renewable energy, weather forecasting, finance, and genomics.

My current focus is on making abstract concepts tangible. For example, direct manipulation of layout constraints in a graphic design tool and interactive visualization of state machines.

To get a sense of my design process, see my talk on choosing features. You may also be interested in my 20+ other talks on data visualization, programming, and the time I made a cell phone.

What Kevin is doing now

I’m currently in Amsterdam, the Netherlands working on:

Sketch.systems, an interactive playground and video series about designing system behavior using hierarchical finite state machines (with Ryan Lucas and Nicki Vance)
Finda, a recognition-based, information-dense computer interface to end the tyranny of GUI windows, tabs, and useless hierarchy
Interactive visualizations of a first order relational logic (more on this later).

I update this section on a monthly basis. Last updated: 2018 August 19.

Computering projects

Stop Slacking, an email interface to Slack (2018 May)
Sketch.systems, a playground for designing system behavior (2018 April–present)
Finda, switch to anything in under 16 milliseconds (2018 January–present)
Subform, a digital UI design tool and layout engine (2015 June–2018 June)
Moneyhawk, a personal finance tracker (2017 January–2017 October)
Denizen, a user management service (2014 August–2015 June)
Difftron, an image-diffing integration testing tool (2014 June–2014 October)
Variance, grammar of graphics HTML data visualization (2014 April–2015 December)
Weathertron, another iOS weather app (2013 June–present)
The DevOp, guides/software for computering hygiene (2013 March–present)
Weather Table, an iOS weather app (2012 December–2013 June)
C2, a ClojureScript data visualization library (2012 March–2016 March)
Kindle Games, developing for the black and white Kindle (2012)
See my Github homepage for a comprehensive list of my open source work

Woodworking / Architecture projects

Looking at a Volvo, thoughts on a $50k station wagon (2017 October)
Stool-a-thon, a month-long celebration of stools + using up scrap lumber (2017 July)
Workshop, designing and building a workshop (2016 July–2017 April)
LSL cabinet, exposed framing meets in-wall storage (2016 May)
Laser-cut tetrominoes, an excuse to learn SolidWorks (2015 January–2015 February)
Phonetron, an artisinal walnut + leather cell phone (2014 July–2015 May)

Miscellaneous notes

These notes aren’t polished; I wrote/recorded them to help myself explore an idea. They’re listed here just in case someone finds ‘em interesting or useful:

On presenting relational data in tables (2018 August)
Practicing code interviews (2018 June)
Subform export (2018 January)
On direct manipulation (2018 March)
Subform command architecture (2017 October)
Statechart update (2017 October)

Please get in touch!

I love to hear from people, especially if I can help with their projects or careers! Please email me if you:

want more details about any of my projects (tech implementation, business strategy, etc.)
would like an introduction to someone (e.g. visualization/statistics, functional programming, or software design experts; investors in those domains)
want feedback on something you’re making

If you think it’s weird to email people you don’t know — it’s not! Some of the best relationships I have, business and personal, started when one of us reached out to the other for help on a project, thoughts on a problem, or just coffee! So, if you’re considering emailing, please do it!

For best results, see Patrick McKenzie’s tips for emailing busy people.