Amy Gorin
1-415-637-4757 (cell/voicemail)

Short Form

Writer, book editor/vision specialist, UI/UE consultant, cognitive and physical ergonomics.
MIT Cognitive Science, MIT Engineering, Stanford Social Science, Berkeley Sustainable Design/Architecture.

Experience Overview

Book doctor

I help cutting edge thinkers to present their ideas more clearly. This may include information architecture, conceptual and developmental editing, and deep analysis of cognitive flow. Past clients include David Siegal (Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business), Andreas Weigend (proprietary), and Paul Mahler (VoIP Telephony with Asterisk, second edition).

Writer and editor

My freelance writing projects have included designing animations for a multimedia calculus textbook, research for and creation of information files for inclusion in an online medical reference for health care consumers, and writing audio dialogs and evaluation questions for an ESL workbook.

I am familiar with Adobe, Microsoft, Corel, and GNU publishing and graphics software. I have strong opinions about the Oxford comma.

UI and usability consultant

My user interaction consulting experience includes managing and participating in ethnographic research, benchmarking, requirements analysis and functionality brainstorming, usability analysis, and user testing. Specific deliverables have included design wireframes, UI specifications, widget specifications, and detailed test plans and usability reports.

Prior Experience (staff, contract, full-time, and part-time)

Rewrite Editor, Staff (November 2002- February 2009)
Rewrite Editor, Contractor (November 2001 - November 2002)

Computing Reviews, Palo Alto CA
Computing Reviews publishes synopses and reviews, of books and papers, in fields ranging from mathematical theory to business administration to user interface design. As a rewrite editor, I did everything from a light proofread, of essentially finished material, to completely reworking text written by non-native speakers of English. Computing Reviews is a publication of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM),

Webmaster (October 1994 - February 2006)

The Annals of Improbable Research, Cambridge MA
AIR is a semimonthly publication often described as "the MAD magazine of Science." I created HotAIR in 1994 using Emacs and HTML 1.0, and in 1999 transitioned the site to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

During my time as Webmaster, HotAIR was listed on Pointcom's Top 5%, as a USA Today "Hotsite" (four times), and as an Exploratorium Cool Site. It was consistently ranked as the Internet's most popular science humor site by Yahoo and Google.

[Note that HotAIR's URL was http://www.improbable.com or http://www.improb.com - NOT http://www.hotair.com.]

more experience ...

Education

Certificate in Sustainable Design, UC Berkeley
(UC Berkely Extension/Professional Program in Sustainable Design)

• The Berkeley Sustainable Design program is an interdisciplinary course of study serving architects, builders, landscape architects, designers, and urban planners. Students work closely with professionals in the green design movement to cover a broad range of subjects, including sustainable materials and manufacturing, accessible design, daylighting and site-based design, and urban permaculture.
• Since I was not coming from an architecture background, I also took many courses in the Interior Design and Interior Architecture program, also at the Berkeley Extension. These include Space Planning, Rapid Visualization, Lighting Design, Building Components and Systems, Kitchen Design, and History of Architecture I&II (and, of course, AutoCAD).

MA in Communication, Stanford University
(School of Humanities and Sciences/social science)

• "Communication" uses the theories and techniques of experimental psychology, social psychology, sociology, education, and linguistics to address questions in consumer behavior, technology and information diffusion, interface design, and interpersonal interaction. Many of the teachings and practices of communication theory are now found in the much newer field of experimental economics. This is not a marketing or journalism degree.
• My research focused on the psychological and social implications of online interaction.

BS in Cognitive Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(School of Science/psychology)

• Concentration in psychology
• Senior thesis on improving the readability of online text

Second BS in Human Factors Engineering, MIT
(School of Engineering/interdisciplinary)

• Minor in technical communication
• This was a self-designed major within the Department of Mechanical Engineering that included coursework in chemistry and biology. All MIT undergraduates study physics and advanced math.

Additional substantial course work in industrial engineering/management and product design at both MIT and Stanford.

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