Kenji Ohara

I spent ten years on Apple's Human Interface team, mostly on the apps you don't think of as apps — the keyboard, the lock screen, the quiet places. I'm now a designer-engineer at Linear and visiting faculty at Lattice through Cohort XV.

I teach the course most engineers think they don't need. Interface & Interaction is twelve weeks on the part of software where humans meet the system — typography, motion, latency, accessibility, the small accumulating decisions that make a tool feel either obvious or hostile.

Most of my students arrive thinking design is what happens after the engineering is done. By week three, they've measured the perceived latency cost of a 16ms animation. By week six, they've rebuilt a small text editor and learned why the cursor blink rate was once a contentious standardization meeting. I never have to argue the case again after that.

The rest of the year I work on Linear — keyboard navigation, sync state, the small things — and write about typography on the web with what an old colleague described as "the seriousness most people reserve for cryptography."