Shaun Modi

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TM is a product design and innovation group in San Francisco. Its mission is to support enterprising teams looking to improve the world through technology. TM leverages business strategy, emerging technology, and UX design to engineer entirely new ways to realize real-world, immediate value for established businesses looking to change—and startups looking to change the world. Founded by the minds that designed Airbnb’s ecosystem from the ground up, TM blends creative and pragmatic experience working with leaders to define a product’s vision in order to drive measurable, meaningful impact. We specialize in using design to integrate complex, emerging technologies—artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, geospatial data, and more—into your product in the most intuitive way possible. Clients include startups, technology companies, and government agencies. They span industries including healthcare, cybersecurity, transportation, enterprise applications, financial services, and consumer products. Whether a pre-launch startup or a modernizing institution—our clients are looking to reimagine themselves through emerging technology as a way to take control of their future and growth

Served as one of the first product designers at Airbnb. Worked closely with CEO Brian Chesky to define the company’s product vision, strategy, and user experience, helping to shape its transformation from a low-cost alternative to hotels to its current state as a travel marketplace that’s been used by over 500 million guests across every country in the world (except for North Korea, Iran, and Sudan). Some of Shaun’s most notable projects and experiences at Airbnb include: –Led user research and design teams to reinvent the booking experience on the guest and host sides of the marketplace. –Led product development of Airbnb Wish Lists, which introduced a viral distribution and sharing mechanism into the product; in turn, Wish Lists helped to increase conversion and became an entirely new organic marketing channel. –Architected a rehaul of Airbnb’s visual design system, which emphasized immersive and inspirational photography of homes and destinations. Soon after the launch of the redesign, engagement with the Airbnb website increased by 30%. -Collaborated with CEO Chesky to create an early prototype of the Airbnb Experiences product, which is now the company’s fastest-growing business unit

Led design on a skunkworks team collaborating closely with co-founder Sergei Brin and Andy Herzfeld (lead engineer of Google Circles) to unify and personalize the Google experience across the company’s entire suite of products. Worked closely with product leadership, designers, engineering, managing executives and founders across multiple properties, including Google Maps, Chrome, and the Google product ecosystem. Key initiatives included: Unified Google product experience: Led design of high-profile project that introduced a single user identity to connect customer actions across Google’s core properties: Gmail, Maps, Search, and YouTube. This project introduced more personalization into the Google ecosystem and was core to Google’s transformation into a more cohesive, people-centered product. This work also included creating a shared visual language and global site navigation across Gmail, Maps, Search and YouTube. Worked on a system and method for personalizing content for a user, which incorporated user feedback in order to continuously update the machine learning model. Shaun later received a patent for this method of organizing a stream of content. Shaun received additional patents during this time for displaying related content in a content stream, content access control in a social network, and scoring stream items with models based on user interests. Google Maps: Contributed advanced features and functionality to Google Maps, including 3D map view, metadata overlays, and augmented reality layers.

Provided strategic vision and product design solutions for Motorola’s Enterprise Mobility Business, working in both the public and private sectors, including logistics, aerospace, oil and gas, public safety, health care, and the military. Created user-centered technologies, including software systems and rugged mobile computers, for enterprise businesses, factoring in procurement requirements as well as end-user needs. Clients included FedEx, McKesson Health IT, UPS, fire departments, the Army, and Boeing. Used technical tools (advanced 3D software, Autodesk Alias, SolidWorks) to design for durability in tough environments.

Worked on-site at MIT with Gui Trotti & Dr. Dava Newman under a grant funded by the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC). Designed rovers and mobile habitats for future exploratory missions to the moon. Worked in SolidWorks and Rhino to design a mobile lunar base using composite inflatables that could expand, contract, and be networked together in order to explore the majority of the surface of the moon. In addition to designing the mobile habitats, work included designing auxiliary vehicles for mission resupply of vital industrial materials, and exploring solutions for radiation events. Concepts from the study have since been included in design requirements for NASA’s 2020 lunar mission.

Designed vehicles and habitats for NASA’s return to the moon by 2020 as part of a select internship at the Johnson Space Center, as part of the Constellation Program set up by President George W. Bush. Worked in the Human Factors Lab, designing NASA’s lunar outpost, lunar ascent vehicle, and lunar lander mobility system—creating a flexible environment factoring in how the body behaves in microgravity for astronauts living and working on the moon. Concepts were evaluated by end-user astronauts, including Andy Thomas. Designed and built a refreshed mock-up of the International Space Station’s crew quarters and conducted ergonomic evaluations of the new crew exploration vehicle. Design reviews of the lunar ascent vehicle were run by Thomas as well as the Chief Health and Medical Officer of NASA.

Selected for a project funded by Nokia at MIT’s Sloan School of Management to invent one of the first wearable devices that utilized multi-touch technology, with haptic buttons in the palm for customizable gestures. The device could be worn on the hand, wrist, or around the neck, and was co-created with executives from Ford and GM, who were also selected for the project. Several trips were made to Nokia’s headquarters in Helsinki, Finland to participate in brainstorming, research, and strategic planning sessions.

Selected by MIT faculty to participate in a highly competitive course, Product Design and Development, involving teams of management, engineering, and industrial design students working to conceive, design and prototype a physical product. Within that course, selected for an international product development project along with other student delegates from MIT and Finland University of Technology to work on prototyping a wearable device for Nokia.

Attended the International Space University's Space Studies Program (SSP) in Beijing, China. The SSP is a graduate-level professional development program of aerospace professionals from government space agencies such as NASA, ESA, JAXA, and companies such as Boeing, CAE, Lockheed Martin, GE, and Northrop Grumman. The curriculum covers the principal space-related fields, both non-technical and technical and ranges from policy and law, business and management and humanities to life sciences, engineering, physical sciences and space applications. Focused on disaster warning and mitigation systems leveraging remote sensing / GIS, and the effects of microgravity on the human body.