Hello! My name is Emmy and I’m a product designer working to better peoples’ lives. I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University where I studied industrial design and human computer interaction.
I attack every project as a problem waiting to be solved, enjoy working in teams but thrive independently. My appreciation for space, and obsessive care for detail have led me to this path. Whenever I can reduce complexity into simplicity, I feel it’s beautiful and that I have succeeded.
When I’m not designing for work, I’m an avid recipe creator, workout
trend guru, traveler, reader, and Indian food enthusiast.
Please view my resume here.
Contact me: emmyhacker@icloud.com
Kind Words from Friends
I met Emmy Hacker, when I joined the IBM Watson Education business unit in Feb 2016. As Design Principal, I oversaw the design strategy and new business development for our portfolio of products. I worked directly with Emmy on our Early Childhood learning platform, we were working with Sesame Street bringing cognitive and machine learning to children's learning applications.
At IBM, the quality of our engineering and research teams' ideas are spectacularly beautiful, complex, and rich. I try to bring a level of engagement and crispness that matches those qualities. Knowing my own limitations, I do my best to act as a translator and engage super-inventive visual designers and illustrators to help articulate an idea and give it impact. Emmy Hacker was one of those indispensable collaborators. We worked through and permanently documented a whole view of a 20th century student on our non-whiteboard wall. It is a frequent photo-stop on the IBM Design Studio tour. Emmy also collaborated with me to create a physical model of how our cognitive application worked in a tangible yet abstracted way. Artificial Intelligence is complicated to explain especially while its forming and growing. She is a great systems thinker and strives to understand the whole in order to deliver the right thing placed well.
- Jodi Cutler, Design Principal and Practice Lead at IBM Watson
I had the pleasure of working with Emmy on a fast-paced incubation project for IBM. When we met, and I learned about her achievements before joining the company I was in awe of what I saw in her portfolio filled with inspired interactive projects that go way beyond a screen experience.
Emmy is a talented designer who has unique vision and style that at times is guided by an engineers mindset. All of which she put to good use during the work we did together, and her work on the Watson Education team. Emmy's design skills transcend digital, but she has a wonderful ability to harness her abilities and translate it towards many mediums.
If I had the opportunity, I would hire her in a second.
- Greg Storey, Senior Director of Design at InVision
Emmy Hacker has a way with simplifying problems and getting to the heart of what a user needs. I loved collaborating with her on IBM Watson Education because she asked thought provoking questions and provided feedback which could falsify my designs in a heartbeat. Having worked alongside her for over a year, I appreciate and have been inspired by her ability to “listen to understand” instead of “listen to respond” which I believe helps her to digest domain knowledge quickly and accurately. Her ability to quickly understand data, complex problems and user needs is the reason she was my go-to person for brainstorming or if I need an extra pair of critical eyes before shipping a design. I thoroughly enjoyed collaborating with Emmy Hacker and I believe any team would be incredibly lucky to have that opportunity as well.
- Jennifer Wright, Senior Product Designer at Athenahealth