Colin Owens
Twenty years finding out. Now building, teaching, and taking on work.
Now
I run aboutface.io — a research and development lab whose founding question, first formalized in a 2009 MFA thesis on synaesthesia and dynamic media, hasn't changed: how do we build tools that work with how people actually perceive, rather than how computers work? The work spans cross-modal interaction, information trust, and the long-form research that informs the practice.
Cross-Modal Foundation
The original research, formalized in a 2009 MFA thesis at the Dynamic Media Institute. Four centuries of artists and scientists trying to connect light and sound, distilled into a working principle for software: build around how perception actually behaves, not around mechanical metaphor.
Active R&D
Weave VR
A rebuild of the original cross-modal music mixing environment (formerly ShapeMix) on Meta Quest using hand tracking. Sound objects placed directly in three-dimensional space — no screen, no controller. The cross-modal mappings become literal.
Active Research
Social Trust Anchors
A framework for information reliability grounded in Peircean semiotics and pragmatist philosophy. Formalizing how trust in any claim is established when the source is increasingly opaque. Working notes and a forthcoming prototype.
Synthesis
Twenty years of teaching — at RISD, MassArt, AIB, and Lesley. Visual Systems, Sound Design for Dynamic Media, Information Architecture, Design for Dynamic Media. The classroom as a laboratory for the same questions.
Currently building Cubiq (a B2B SaaS platform), Weave (iOS), and Shuttlecar (Mac, live). Built work develops at Design practice →.
Available for
If one of these is your problem, let's talk.
Agency & studio roles
Creative technologist
In-house at an agency, or a partner role to start one. Twenty years of design plus an active practice that ships built work end-to-end — interaction design, data visualization, design systems, native applications. Looking for the right team.
Design & build
Schema-first product engagements
B2B SaaS, fintech, enterprise tooling. Designing and architecting products schema-first, alongside founders or principals — the way Cubiq is being built. Strategy, system design, and shipped product, not slideware.
Curriculum & teaching
Faculty & program development
New courses, certificate programs, or workshop series in visual systems, multimodal interaction, information architecture, or sound design for dynamic media. Twenty years of teaching at RISD, MassArt, AIB, and Lesley — open to faculty appointments and curriculum work.
Workshops & facilitation
Structured thinking together
Half-day or full-day working sessions for design teams, leadership, or mixed groups working through hard product, system, or strategy problems. Not lectures — something actionable at the end.
Principles
Twenty years across very different domains — music technology, fintech, advertising platforms, enterprise software, academic research — and the same ideas keep surfacing. These aren't methods. They're the lens.
Everything connects. A button is never just a button — it's the end of a chain of decisions about architecture, language, mental model, and trust. Design the system, not the surface.
We don't see and hear separately. We perceive as one system. The best tools are built around how people actually experience the world — not how data is organized in a database.
Technology is the vehicle, not the destination. The question is always: what does this make possible? What does it make easier to think?
Anchored to problems, not methods. The right tool for this situation. Frameworks are useful until they aren't — the skill is knowing when to set them down.
Physics, not interfaces. When software borrows the logic of the physical world — gravity, collision, space — it becomes intuitive in a way that no onboarding flow can replicate.
Background
The research started with how our senses work together. That led to a music mixing company. That led to teaching. Teaching led to building products at the largest technology companies in the world. All of it led to the same question, restated.
2009
MFA, Graphic Design — MassArt
Thesis: how our senses interconnect, and what that means for the tools we build. Synaesthesia as a model for dynamic media.
2007–2012
Founder — Shapemix
Music mixing as physics. Raised $2M. Launched four iOS apps, including a SPIN Magazine co-branded remixing contest. Patent US20110271186A1. The thesis, made real.
2007–2018
Faculty — RISD, Lesley University, Emerson College
Visual Systems, Design for Dynamic Media, Data Visualization for Journalism.
2014–2015
Designer — Stackdriver → Google
From startup to Google Cloud Monitoring. Developer tools. Data visualization library for Google Cloud. The scale problem: how do you make infrastructure legible to the people who depend on it?
2019–2021
Principal Designer — Fidelity Investments
Fractional trading, mobile design systems, trading flows. $2M in daily profits on launch. The same question in fintech: how do you make a complex system feel navigable?
2022–2023
Lead Designer — Meta
Ads Manager. Machine-learning guidance. Audience expansion. Giving millions of advertisers meaningful control over systems.
2026–
Founder — aboutface.io
R&D lab for human-AI collaboration. The question, restated for the current moment: how do we build AI tools that work with how people think?