Hello, I’m Gerrit.

I build, lead, and grow design teams. Together, we solve complex system and strategy problems in simple ways.

At Google, I’m leading a team designing product experiences and systems.

I specialize in three areas: Leading design teams on ambiguous projects that may take years to design and launch, helping designers grow their careers, and defining strategy.

Previously, I led a design team at Deloitte. I helped forward-thinking clients design strategy and launch new products and services.

My design career started 15 years ago after graduating from Architecture school. After graduating, I designed furniture and managed products for EQ3.

I had experience in design thinking, but I needed to better understand the business side of design. After getting my MBA, I entered the world of management consulting as a designer.

A long time ago, my friend, friend and I noticed that most home healthcare products are cold, clinical, and do little to inspire the self confidence of those who need them. We set out to change that and launched Top & Derby. Our first product was the award winning Chatfield walking cane.

I’m an advocate for Orbiting The Giant Hairball, so I do a lot of exploration. I’m currently exploring participatory machine learning, complex systems, and generative art–the latent walk gif on this site is generated from a dataset of sketches I created and trained on StyleGAN dataset dataset (StyleGAN attribution).

I’m a lifelong learner. Here’s my monthly library of articles, podcasts, videos, resources, and books I explore. I create new libraries every month.