👋 Hello.
Tash Keuneman is in the liminal space between product, writing and climate action.
Art
Select projects that I enjoyed bringing to life.
Writing
Articles that have featured in publications.
About
Tash Keuneman is a designer of software. Her career milestones include designing the earliest personas at Atlassian, leading design for Intuit’s rest of world arm, and heading up design at Shippit. She’s the head of design at Sonder and is passionate about customer empathy and experimentation. Tash has written about several product frameworks and advises companies doing good things. Outside of software, she is doing her bit for climate action. Education-wise, she has a degree in journalism and another in fine arts.
Tash pays respect to the Gayemagal who are traditional owners of the land in which she resides while recognising the strength, capacity and resilience of past and present Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the Northern Beaches.
Ripe, a creative newsletter
Creativity · Living in the moment · Creative exercises
Overview: This weekly-ish newsletter explores creativity and living in the moment. It weaves intuition, science, data and story into a short essay and finishes off with a creative exercise which you can accomplish with minimal, if any, tools and equipment.There have been variations of this newsletter since 2007, formerly at Run Wild Creative and before that a blog called Little Flutters.
Dance is participatory
Art · Immersive · Interactive
Art · Immersive · Interactive
Overview: When dancing in a social context, it feels vivacious, unpredictable, sweaty, joyous. Everyone on the dance floor is a part of the experience.But when viewing dance in an art or entertainment setting, it can be devoid of that back and forth interaction that cultivates joy.In Dance is Participatory, I invite the viewers, normally passive bodies in an exhibition context, to interact with the art in order to see it as intended at full speed.If the viewer stays still, the art slows down, the more movement, the more enjoyment for all.A collaboration with dancer Awa N’Gom.Awa performs Dancehall, a style of dance that is created and choreographed on the streets and halls of Jamaica. It’s not uncommon for one person to start a dance move and others to join in for a song or two, it’s quite exhilarating.
Divine Being
Poetry and prayer generated · Voice assistant app
Overview: Voice assistants can be a bit cold and yet omnipresent, always listening and knowledgable. I wanted to subvert this with an app called Divine Being that would respond to prompts and questions with poems, prayers and songs to ancient goddesses from the cannons of time. This was created to soothe, intimidate and nourish beyond what Assistant apps were capable of. It was available through the Google Assistant ecosystem.This project confirmed that I don’t necessarily enjoy programming. What was enjoyable was researching poetry, hymns and prayers that went back centuries and millennia. It was an interesting project because it went from something that was created onto a computer to being available to any space around the world that had a Google Assistant speaker.
Fluid Fantasy
Data-generated · Sexuality
Overview: In 2016, I gathered data from 180 diverse women from around the globe on what they currently fantasise about. Through the research, I learnt that sexual fantasies change depending on life stage, culture and sexual history. For example, there were some people who fantasised about rape, and an equal amount that didn’t want to be reminded of their rape history.
Some people had quite complex scenarios running through their head, for others it was more snatches of detail, a hand or feeling.The darker the line in the visualisation, the more stronger the pattern. I’m grateful for all the women that contributed to this work.This work was built on a broad survey and interviews. Rich qualitative data like this begs to be played with in a myriad of ways and the data generation took multiple forms, but ultimately, a circular, inter-connected form was the most accurate representation of something as abstract as sexual fantasy.
We love to hate Clippy — but what if Clippy was right?
September 15, 2022
Overview: Clippy was the first computer software that recognised my intent and helped me, and I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.Read article at UX Collective ↗
How to elevate your design critiques
December 14, 2020
Overview: I started to experiment with hundreds of design critiques, using them as loops to get better: more inclusive, more helpful without sacrificing the rigour of critical conversations and the immediacy of timely feedback.It’s been distilled into this process and it works a treat. Gone are the days of “That button should say submit” or “I don’t like that tagline”. Now we have constructive, warm feedback sessions filled with candour and laughter.Read article at Bootcamp UX ↗
Dear fitness tracker designers
April 5, 2020
Overview: Rhys clambered up the sandstone cliffside faster than I could pull the rope through the belay system. It was an easy climb for an instructor and as he passed my Apple watch back to me, we laughed at how his heart rate for that 45 seconds was lower than my resting heart rate on a good day.
It was a beautifully crisp winter day in June and our banter was light as I learnt how to lead climb.A couple of hours later, I was lying on the ground while Rhys was propping my leg up and calling emergency services.Read article at UX Collective ↗
Finding the numbers in qualitative research
June 25, 2018
Overview: We’re more influenced by our experiences than by reading numbers. Yet, as product people, we’re relying more and more on quantitative data to make decisions.
This could get really dangerous, because quantitative data tells you most things, but it doesn’t tell you why somebody does something, so you could end up optimising for the wrong metric or making assumptions about customer behaviour without ever validating it.Read the article at UX Collective ↗