Hilary Johnson

Six years at Liberty Mutual as a principal IC, leading IA and research for an enterprise intranet used by 45,000 people across eight global markets. I'd developed a habit by then of watching my own cognition in real time, noticing what I notice, tracking how my decisions form. That habit turned out to be exactly what the job required. I was a participant-observer at Fortune 100 scale, watching how 45,000 people moved through information systems that were often built without them in mind, and reworking the navigation and information architecture from the inside. The work mattered most when it was invisible: when nobody noticed the infrastructure because it was finally working.

Oak Grove came next: A multi-market e-commerce platform (US, UK, Japan) built and operated alone, using AI in production across the full operation. Same habit, different context: watching my own judgment form in real time as I made call after call about where AI changes the outcome and where it doesn't. Knowing the difference is the work. Getting that boundary right is the design problem.

My formal training is in human factors and information design, the discipline that studies how people process and interact with information, and where things break down when the system doesn't account for the human.

An M.S. from Bentley gave me the framework to name what I'd been doing intuitively. A graduate degree in Digital Media Design from Harvard Extension kept me making things, not just theorizing about them. A biology degree from Brown taught me to think in systems before I knew I was doing it.

Junior year, I proposed an independent concentration in neuroethics (a field so new it barely had a name yet) and wrote my Biology capstone on the ethics of neuromarketing. The specific concern: that knowledge of how the brain works could just as easily be used to manipulate people as to help them. I didn't stay in the field. But the question stayed with me. It's the same question I find myself asking now, seventeen years later, about AI systems embedded in interfaces that billions of people use every day: systems whose influence strategies can emerge from a model without anyone explicitly programming them, at a scale and personalization that makes the original neuromarketing concerns look modest.

I have auditory-visual synesthesia. When I hear a sound, I see it, involuntarily and automatically, as a visual phenomenon that occupies space. I also have ticker tape synesthesia: when someone speaks to me, their words appear simultaneously as visual text in my mind's eye, scrolling alongside the audio like a second channel running in parallel.

The other part of it is harder to describe. I've been watching how people interact with each other and with their environment since I was small. I have clear memories of doing it at three, six, ten. Sitting in a room, noticing what people reach for, what they avoid, where they get stuck. The human factors training gave this a name and a methodology. The observation habit started much earlier.

I've never learned things in separate containers. New domains have a way of connecting back to everything I've already seen, which makes new areas feel less like starting over and more like adding another layer.

I'm looking for organizations where the question I keep coming back to is also the one they're trying to answer: how do humans and information systems meet, and how do we build that boundary well? The answer keeps changing as AI enters every layer of how we work and think. That's not a problem I want to solve once. It's the kind of work I want to do for a long time.