A little more about my experiences:

• Product Manager & Accessibility Driver @ Microsoft

• Recently worked as a Software Engineering Intern at Microsoft (Outlook for Mac team), focusing on UI design and development. Previously, software engineering and project management intern (summer 2019).

• Recently worked on a UX refresh for Aila Health as a design consultant for Invention Corps, UC Berkeley’s human-centered design club.

• Previously, undergraduate researcher and NSF REU grant recipient at the UC Berkeley Embodied Design Research Lab, Debugging Failure project

In my free time, you can probably find me

• reading, reviewing, and spreading awareness of diverse books on my blog

• driving to remote nature hideouts and stopping to take pictures

• learning how to bake

Another one of my absolute favorite things to do is meeting new people, so if you’re interested in chatting about anything at all, making a new friend, or collaborating, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at geetanshisharma@gmail.com!

What design means to me.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve loved to read. I moved around a lot growing up, but throughout that time books, and the characters who lived inside them, were my constant companions. As I grew older, I continued to see them as that, but also as something more -- a way to better understand the world and the people around me. Through books, I was able to gain empathy and understanding for characters who were going through struggles that were so different from my own--struggles that I never saw coming when I was initially introduced to them. This taught me to look outside of myself and realize how important it was to consider just how many different experiences were possible—that the only way to be truly accessible and understanding is to listen to the stories of those different from you.

About two years ago, when I was entering my sophomore year of college, I experienced a major shift in my own life and how I experienced it, and I felt this importance of listening to stories to an ever greater extent. I got sick, and a negative reaction a medication left me with likely irreparable neuromuscular damage to the left side of my body. In the span of a few months, I went from being a dancer to not being able to walk without being in pain. From being a pianist for seventeen years, to not being able to move one of my hands fast enough to move across the keys. From running to make it to a lecture on time to struggling to get out of bed and walk to class through the pain, and wondering why my school’s disability office didn’t have a way for me to attend classes remotely when I needed to. From laughing with my friends walking down the staircase to my dorm room, to incurring dozens of falls as I tried to climb and descend it on crutches--wondering why there wasn’t an elevator to it or why I couldn’t be moved to a room next to an elevator despite begging to.

Suddenly, I was living in a whole new world. A world that was no longer made for me. No longer designed for me. Over the years, I’ve learned how to better advocate for myself, and to love this new me and all the ways I have grown as a result, but that sinking realization has never gone away.

My goal is to ensure that this feeling -- one of feeling lesser than, silenced, and de-prioritized because of not being a member of a group that is the loudest, the most common, the most traditional -- is felt as little as possible, by as few people as possible. To me, there is no accessible design, only design, which has the singular purpose of making products and the world easier and more enjoyable for everyone to enjoy. I want to listen to and consider the stories and lives of the people who will be using what I am creating, and in turn tell those stories in the designs that I create.