Year
2023-2024
Duration
10 months
Location
Remote
Role
Founding Designer
(UX, UI, Industrial, Brand)
Tools
Figma
Autodesk Fusion
Canva
collaborators
Ark Foundation team
ARRA Networks team
Sweetbridge team
Conduit is a system of products enabling decentralized infrastructure to redefine the internet and power the Sweet Economy.
As founding designer, I...
Opportunity
Today's internet and financial systems are centralized, extractive, and inefficient. Conduit aimed to build an alternative: a secure, decentralized network owned by its users that would enable a more fair and equitable way to conduct commerce. But the underlying technology was complex—spanning blockchain, edge computing, and distributed governance—and the user experience was nonexistent.
An early map of products within the ecosystem based on technical documentation and initial product definition conversations
My Role
As the founding designer, I led design across product, brand, and content:
Research & Concept Framing:
Interviewed stakeholders, facilitated discovery, and mapped product relationships from early whitepapers. Researched technical and financial domains to build design intuition and translate theory into product requirements.
UX/UI Design:
Designed end-to-end product experiences—from UX flows to dev-ready UI screens—for diverse user types—from rural merchants receiving hybrid payments in Zambia to fund managers in London conducting trades across traditional and sweet economy systems. Ran rapid testing with stakeholders to refine flows in a high-ambiguity environment.
Design Systems:
Built an extensible design library to unify visual language, accelerate delivery, support future third-party development, and maintain consistency across all design touchpoints.
Brand:
Developed a brand identity and narrative that conveyed trust, resilience, and modularity—used across fundraising, onboarding, and partner materials.
Industrial Design:
Designed the Founders Edition of the Conduit Node to embody the network’s ethos: distributed, sovereign, and performant. The monolithic form, modular stack, and discreet detailing express functional elegance and trust.
Early wallet UI explorations to define flows for sending, receiving, managing assets, and viewing activity—balancing simplicity with depth while introducing Sweet Economy concepts like Squares, Yields, and CROP contribution. Fast prototyping helps me think through design, surface edge cases, flag technical constraints, and spark new ideas through early feedback. I start wide—designing everything requested or imagined—then distill down to what’s essential.
Process
Discovery & Synthesis
Conducted deep dives across domains—DLT, synchronized ledgers, legal contracts, payment rails, and mining algorithms—to map user types, system flows, and product requirements.
Prototyping & Iteration
Designed and iterated key products in Figma: consumer wallets, merchant platforms, treasury tools, and fund dashboards. Balanced known UI patterns with novel economic concepts, simplifying complexity through visual and interaction design.
Testing & Feedback
In the absence of a formal testing process due to time & resource constraints, I initiated quick feedback loops by gathering input from peers demographically aligned with our target users to walk through prototypes to test clarity and usability.
Merchant payment app designed for shopkeepers in rural Zambia—supporting multi-currency, cash-based transactions and use, conversion, and earning of Sweet Economy reward points. Built to reflect local context while enabling participation in a broader decentralized economy.
Hardware
I designed Conduit’s first hardware product to embody its ethos. The monolithic form conveys strength and trust, while the hexagon references partner Arra Networks’ legacy. Textured recessed panels contrasts with the matte finish for subtle visual depth, and copper accents add a sense of quiet confidence. Hidden vents maintain the purity of the geometry, while a discreet top screen displays essential system information. A white and nickel variant offers the same understated presence for varied environments.
Brand
To build the Conduit brand system, I immersed myself in company documentation and cultural references—from computing history to natural systems—to capture the network’s substance and spirit. I refined the token logo into a sharper, more intentional mark and created a style guide that balances stability with boldness. Translating our values into design principles and specific visual language, the system pairs minimalist clarity with expressive edge—secure, mature, and quietly boundary-pushing.
Outcomes
→ Delivered dev-ready UI mocks and 3D hardware models for complex, modular ecosystem—translating abstract economic and decentralized tech concepts into interactive experiences for consumers, businesses, and operators
→ Aligned cross-functional teams and reconciled fragmented multi-stakeholder input around a clear product vision
→ Built a unified design system and brand narrative spanning digital platforms, physical hardware, and marketing assets—ensuring consistency across fast-moving, cross-disciplinary efforts with shifting priorities