Gong Szeto Design Office

Telehealth, the practice of installing videoconferencing-based technologies in remote areas, is part of a large investment initiative with the University of New Mexico Center for Telehealth and Cybermedicine Research. New Mexico, a relatively poor state, has a sizable pueblo and tribal population, and has trouble providing appropriate levels of diagnostic health care due to long distances between tribal lands and medical centers generally located in high population areas. In conjunction with the Santa Fe Innovation Park, a visualization was created to illustrate relative travel distances to health care infrastructure in New Mexico as well as test the tele health remote locations to see if there was a optimal distribution throughout the state. In addition, this visualization indicates statistics in the major "health regions" in the state to indicate demographic and comparative health statistics, leading to an obvious conclusion that the wealthier areas tend to be more dense with better healthcare infrastructure, with fewer cases of chronic causes of death. The visualization also indicates "healthcare deserts", regions where the travel distance to quality food and healthcare exceeds 100 miles, and are ripe sites for remote telehealth facilities.

SpiderRock is an early-stage financial startup from deep proprietary trading roots. Last year, they decided to spin off a new business that brought to market a number of their powerful order execution algorithms for hedge funds, institutional trade desks, and independent traders to use that matched or exceeded the efficiency and intelligence of any high-speed trading organization out there. Their execution algos are based on years of observations in equity options behavior that correlated n-number of variables and factors that affected price changes and bid-ask spreads throughout the trading day, seeking the optimal time to execute an order. Typically, a trader does two primary things during the day (and in hundreds or even thousands of instances): a trader finds a trade she wants to make that fits predefined and on-the-fly criteria, and then she monitors the order in the market for fills or drops. SpiderRock's intelligent order execution algos automates the execution labor, allowing the trader to focus on idea generation and opportunity monitoring.

The interesting aspect of this branding and identity work was the challenge to package something that was inherently intangible, and highly ephemeral in that these algorithms are essentially proprietary mathematical expressions.​ The work ranged from naming and branding, developing a personality for the company and algorithm products, hypothetical advertisements (an exercise I do for clients from time to time to help them envision how they look and feel in a competitive marketplace), website design and some strategic collateral systems. Algorithms are not a "thing" like a new car, where one can sell style and features. Algorithms are black boxes that embody logic, and customers pay for the promise that these automata can eventually become seamless extensions of their wills. 

One of the first projects I did coming out of a multi-year sabbatical was to design the product experience for OneTrueFan's website gamification toolbar. This included packing a ton of agile technology and functionality into a VERY small footprint that had to enhance a website visitor's page experience without distraction, and to provide website publishers an easy way to create content-based communities by acknowledging and rewarding "fans" to their website properties. On the other side of the coin was the publisher's analytics dashboard which made it easy to connect with fans and to monitor their behaviors, sharing, and chatter trends. 

Shortly after we rolled out all these new feature sets, OneTrueFan was acquired by BigDoor.​

YOD (yourowndemocracy.org) was a conceptual online application that sought to bring (near) real-time voter sentiment on political issues to the fore as a way to inform the voters where the public debate stood on proposed legislation. It was conceived to be used as a way for individuals to track and follow issues that were important to them, as well as share political activity within their social network. YOD also involved a voting mechanism allowed you to arbitrage individual sentiment strength across multiple issue areas, reflecting the same sentiment plasticity found in fluctuating stock market pricing based on buy/sell transaction volume.

YOD was a finalist in the 2009 Buckminster Fuller Challenge.​

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Signs of Danger is an open journal that seeks to document my explorations into the complex worlds of risk. Risk is already intricately woven into some of the work I do, from financial risk to geopolitical risk. I recently made a personal commitment to explore even deeper the vast historical, cultural, political, and social dimensions of risk...the epistemology of risk, if you will. The end game (I think) is that I would like this exploration to generate some new ideas about how to interact more productively with risk. I have a fair number of back-of-napkin ideas about new ways that risk can be better exposed and understood by people of any level of sophistication, but these will take time to bake and iterate. And how better to do it than with current and future readers of this website already invested in the subject matter of risk bearing witness?

There is vast literature already on the subject, from the science of risk, history of risk, politics of risk, not to mention popular culture, movies, literature, and board games. And I will attempt to cover all of it in this blog, because it's all relevant to me. There isn't, however, very much (if at all) literature on the formal aspects of risk in culture, private and public sectors, in the technology continuum. So that's what I am going to do...open Pandora's box to wrestle with all the genies that come out, in hopes that they will all shed light on a part of the human experience that everyone can relate to when it rears its ugly head. Risk is everywhere. We just can't always see it, and much of the time, it's intangible and formless. Even if we do see it or experience it, we don't always know what to do about it. And many times, we just seem to ignore it, usually at our peril.

Visit signsofdanger.net

Cerrio is a technology startup who is attempting to accelerate real-time data application development by making their entire workspace a simple visual drag-and-drop experience for developers new to cloud-based complex event processing. My assignment was to take their alpha workspace design, which was prototyped using .NET GUI frameworks, and translate it to a browser-based HTML5 environment using all the latest user affordances in an interactive app-building environment. One critical feature of this workspace is expressing the real-time nature of the data being connected together, as well as the data flow inputs and outputs. Not unlike building the plumbing infrastructure in your home while the water is running at full pressure.

HUMINT, GEOINT, MASINT, OSINT, SIGINT, TECHINT, FININT.

This is a list of intelligence gathering disciplines.​ One segment of my client base deals with geopolitical risk as it relates to national security, foreign policy, disaster preparedness, and humanitarian crisis vulnerability assessment. The work that I do seeks to find new ways of synthesizing a growing number of intelligence data streams into a coherent and actionable framework. The mosaic shown here are fragments of exploratory work that deals with the constantly changing data streams of the intelligence gathering methods listed above. 

OptionsHouse is a retail equity options trading brokerage incubated and launched by PEAK6. I was one of the original launch team members (I was employee #1), and I served as Director of Product Design since its inception, with only a staff of one information architect at my side. OptionsHouse was where I cut my teeth in the complex world of global finance and the design of financial derivatives trading systems, and since this experience I have never looked back. The Insight-Decision-Action design methodology I have employed throughout my career had never been put to the test like this. Nothing this big. Nothing this complex.

​The OptionsHouse platform had to deal with ~9,000 stock symbols, ~180,000​ options symbols, constantly updating price information, multipliers of 3x to 5x of data analytic overlays, 40K+ active trader clients, hundreds of millions of dollars of trade transactions per day, integration of multiple third party APIs and data feeds, branding and marketing a new challenger in a crowded field of 800 lb. gorillas, development of a fully staffed customer service administration and issue escalation system, converting design and code-base to private label institutional clients, inventing new features that leveraged PEAK6's proprietary options trading expertise and market making liquidity, developing (at the time) the world's most sophisticated browser-based AJAX application...all while reinventing and streamlining the trading workflow for retail clients of varying levels of sophistication, from high-volume technical day traders to conservative hedge traders looking to use options as insurance against other big bets in the market. And I had never traded a thing in my life before this project. :)

OptionsHouse has been awarded 4-5 stars every consecutive year by industry benchmark Barron's for "Best in Options Trading" and "Best in Usability" since its launch in 2005.​ 

I continue to consult for OptionsHouse and other PEAK6 business units on various retail and proprietary trading and risk management related initiatives.​

Bloomberg/Businessweek article on my experience designing OptionsHouse.​

In 2010, Janina Pawlowski and I collaborated on designing and developing an online platform that streamlined the way citizens and their representatives could interface one another on the growing number of legislative bills on a federal, state, and local level, a profound information processing problem, if there ever was one. Hundreds of issue categories, numerous bills within each category that had to be parsed, analyzed and then determined if there is enough public support behind them, and then multiplying all that times the number of bills that are in play at the federal, state, and local levels—all adding up to cognitive overload, and (in my opinion) a major factor in voter apathy. There's just too much going on at any one time, and to determine whether or not a piece of legislation actually affects someone's life (or someone's community or tribe) in any meaningful way generally requires relying on the mainstream media interface to inform public opinion. This work attempted to disintermediate the problematic MSM middleman and to provide a direct connection between citizen and representative on key legislation.

After I resigned my post at PEAK6 in 2009 to go on sabbatical, the talented team at OptionsHouse embarked on an ambitious overhaul of their trading technology subsystems, rearchitecting a number of critical engineering areas that improved system performance many-fold. It was also an opportunity to apply the many lessons learned from customers about how to improve the overall trading experience. I was not part of this OptionsHouse 2.0 initiative, but was later brought in to radically rethink how to incorporate context sensitive risk signals to customers about the status of their portfolios and trades. ​The challenge was that the 2.0 infrastructure was pretty far along and whatever I came up with had to work with that grain. I proposed a number of new standalone apps as part of an easy-to-understand "risk suite" that was de-coupled from the rest of the OptionsHouse suite, but had certain color-coded risk signals that would be infused in key parts of the trading experience. This project also included the development of proprietary risk calculation algorithms that looked at hundreds of market factors and variables, reconciling them with a customer's existing and intended positions. The output from these algorithmic calculations became the basis for all the risk signatures incorporated into the new risk-aware OptionsHouse 2.0 trading platform. 

3D visualizations of market risk whose variables are user-definable are in the works as part of this new suite using some pretty trick HTML5 technologies that simply did not exist during my tenure over OptionsHouse 1.0. Look to see updates to this page when those features roll out.​

​In 2010, Janina Pawlowski, Joel Mahoney, and I collaborated on a new online platform that facilitated the process for people who were unsure about a political issue form a solid position on it, by providing a user experience that allowed them to efficiently experience various stakeholder's opinions on the issue. Some of the innovations that we came up with were to comingle citizen opinion with media and special interest opinion into a mosaic of POV's on an issue, but organizing them into "YES" and "NO" columns on a webpage, with the core issue matter being deliberated in the middle. A visitor to the site could easily view succinct opinions from citizens, experts, newspaper editorials, and packaged text and video experiences from special interest groups called "soapboxes". Individuals could post text-based comments on an issue in the discussion thread (also organized around "YES" and "NO"), or they themselves could create a "soapbox".

This platform was developed and deployed as a testbed during the 2010 California Statewide Direct Primary Election, which had five controversial public initiatives on the ballot.​

When state-of-the-art doesn't cut it, you have to roll your own. This financial services client wanted infinite flexibility in finding good trade ideas in the marketplace, but hit the wall on a number of fronts: all existing search tools they had at their disposal had serious limitations, could not deal with multiple and simultaneous data feeds well, and additional steps had to taken to reconcile search returns (even with powerful booleans) with variable trader risk limits and risk violation settings that change on a daily basis.

The solution to these many thorny site-specific problems was to invent a new query language tailored specifically to the needs of high-volume derivatives traders. However, traders are busy people, and are of varying levels of technological sophistication, and few have time to learn the ins and out of a LISP-based query language, from syntax, grammars, logic, and industry and firm-specific variables and constants. A visual drag and drop graphical user interface had to be developed on top of this new language, and that's where I came in. ​We looked at MIT's Scratch as a starting point, and then developed it into a new trading framework that (from what I hear) has increased a trader's "vetted" trade volume nearly 1000%. Trading workflow has changed dramatically. Traders are no longer monitoring incremental price ticks or bid-ask spreads, nor are they manually working their 1000's of orders during the day. This new programming language essentially allows them to build human-computer parametric trade algorithms on the fly, constructing smart queries that are essentially based on their pre-/intra- market intuitions and insights. It's incredibly trader-specific.

Drag, drop, generate, auto-execute, auto-hedge, get a cup of coffee, watch a little Bloomberg.

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Appfog is a cloud-based hosting service founded in Portland, OR, by tech entrepreneur Lucas Carlson. Appfog needed a way to communicate the trends happening in the Cloud space and how that would affect their core customer segments, developers of new online applications and enterprise customers seeking to harness the benefits of moving their IT operations into the Cloud. It began with a sketch by Carlson, which evolved into an infographic explaining the evolution of Cloud services in terms of the logical progression of infrastructure (IaaS), software (SaaS), and platform (PaaS), and how this progression is leading to pronounced levels of development efficiency because services like Appfog literally take the time-consuming overhead of IT maintenance out of the development picture.

This infographic was picked up by GigaOM earlier this year in "Why 2013 is the year of 'NoOps' for programmers [Infographic]"

Branding and identity development for a new financial markets and risk management education startup.

One of the things I worked on during my tenure at PEAK6 was to facilitate the launch of a new website property called "WeSeed". WeSeed sought to completely rethink the way newbie investors could learn about the stock market by creating a virtual online trading platform that was user-friendly, based on the very same market data feeds that OptionsHouse used, but organizing it in a way that aligned with how consumers think about the products they consumed. The metaphors we used were more retail consumption-oriented than institutional investor-oriented, and WeSeed made buying stocks as familiar as adding a product to a shopping cart. Industry sectors were called "passion areas", as WeSeed felt that people were more apt to invest in companies whose products they were already familiar with. I designed a pre-launch version of WeSeed, working out the translation of the OptionsHouse virtual trading engine into an accessible retail user experience, and worked with the educational and marketing arms of WeSeed to develop the brand and marketing personality and voice.

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One of the more interesting ventures PEAK6 incubated while I was there was launching a new options trading advisory complete with on-the-floor reporting of market activity over live and archived web video, interviews with notable fund managers and traders, and value-added subscription-based advisory services. My task was to develop a coherent customer experience that integrated ONN's many properties and assets.

This blast from the past is a presentation that my design firm i/o 360 digital design produced for Dow Jones & Company, who was an early client during the dotcom boom. I introduced the Insight-Decision-Action framework as a way for the Wall Street Journal to leverage its journalism into new value-added applications for its subscriber base, by allowing new "action points" to make themselves visible to the reader as they browse the day's financial news. It was, in effect, a proposal to turn WSJ into a personal portfolio management tool, using WSJ's reporting as "insights" that could facilitate efficient portfolio and risk management "actions". 

It was the thinking behind this short presentation that laid the groundwork for so much of my work in the decade that followed.​