About Me

I haven’t always been a designer, but I’ve always been a communicator.

Overcoming a childhood stutter has been one of my most profound accomplishments, and one that has taught me over the years about deliberate, strategic communication. That is, making words count, and understanding how your audience hears you. Stage acting became a platform to exercise this muscle, and I performed for years in high school and later in college.

A lifelong passion for innovation, understanding human behavior and hoping to change the world for the better pulled me towards an interdisciplinary education at Oberlin College, where I majored in Politics with a focus on political psychology, earning High Honors for my research paper in the field. My work revolved around understanding how people make decisions, and how the widespread consumption of digital media unconsciously guides opinions, behavior and public policy.

After graduating in the spring of 2016, I merged a broad passion for problem solving, transportation and digital media with a knack for community building, connection and unconscious decision-making as a Community Manager—and eventually Product Designer at The Points Guy. My strength in user experience became increasingly evident as I designed communities, grew audiences and strategized content, even harkening back to websites I designed as early as middle school. UX and visual communication was something I was doing everyday, and I wanted to make it my day job. By 2021, I officially did.

Still, I took on problems beyond my full-time role. As a passion project, I proposed homepage redesign of the NYC Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s “MYmta” transit app to solve some users-reported problems. Before that, I designed an imagined new feature for Spotify called Transitions Mode.

Most recently, I’ve begun a two-year Masters program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design studying Urban Planning and Design in order to problem solve in physical space. At school, I look to study how public space design affects social behavior and health. Through this lens, I aim to merge my UX background with an urban design practice, focusing on how to incorporate scalable, accessible and affordable means of refuge and connection into the built environment.

I’m ever-curious and always learning inside and outside of my full-time gigs, where I also love biking, photo-taking, playlist-making, plane-spotting and getting (a tad) lost.

— WMC

Wallace Maxwell Cotton

Urban Planning and Design | UX Professional

I’m a professional UX designer and Master in Urban Planning student at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I have 7+ combined years of full-time and freelance experience in UX design, content creation, marketing and audience development.

A full-time grad student, but open to the right freelance opportunity. Say hi!

Resume

View here.

Contact

Email (personal): wcshack@gmail.com
Email (school): wcotton@gsd.harvard.edu
Social: LinkedIn, Instagram or Twitter.

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Key Skills:

Urban Planning and Design, including Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, GIS, R, research and more.
UX/UI Design, including sketching, wireframing and prototyping with auto-layout in Figma.
Strategy & content creation, including content design, brand management and audience development.
Community managment, including Facebook Groups and Instagram audiences.

Education:

Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD): Master in Urban Planning and Design, Class of 2025
Shift Nudge, Interface Design, 2021
General Assembly, User Experience Design, 2018 - 2019
Oberlin College, Bachelor of Arts, Major in Politics with High Honors. Class of 2016

Video projects:

The novel coronavirus, COVID-19, has forced airlines to ground most of their airplanes. Where are they parking all of the aircraft? What is the storage proce...

The travel industry has ground to a halt and millions have put their travel plans on hold. But when can we travel again? No one knows for sure, but moves fro...