Dinner #11 on June 23, 2011

The Bing Design team has offered to host a design centric Geek Girl Dinner. For the first hour of our dinner, we will have an amazing panel composed of several key designers from Bing. They will discuss the latest innovations in design and the various career paths you can take in this discipline.

Not to mention, Bing is hosting our dinner in the café on the 23^rd floor of Bravern 2 Bldg in Bellevue. Be prepared for some amazing views of Lake Washington! Side note: parking will be validated …

In the spirit of girl power, the Bing Design team will also be raffling off a $100 gift card to Bravern. You must be present to win!

The dinner is on June 23, and starts at 6 pm. Space is limited, so be sure to register at the Eventbrite page

Below are the biographies of our panelist. We look forward to seeing you again next month!

-Liz, Stevi, and Vanessa

Laura Kerr

UX DIRECTOR, Bing

Laura is a firm believer in the power of people and the strength of emotional design. She has over a decade of large-scale, consumer-facing services experience at Microsoft. She SKUs toward V1 problems, of which she still believes Search is one. At Bing, she is working toward an integrated approach that redefines a cultural balance between experience design and technology.

Laura is a Minnesota native but has been in Seattle long enough to truly appreciate the fog and rain and the quiet reflection it offers. She has an eclectic collection of higher degrees, has lived in Greece, Italy, and speaks several languages. She loves to swing dance, explore food culture, and play with her most awesome 2-yr old daughter, Chloe.

Mira Lane

Bing Design PM Lead – Studio Management, Prototyping, UX PM

Mira Lane has been leading User Experience innovation in Bing for the past 5 years. Her most recent accomplishments include the successful launch of Bing where her team was responsible for much of the visible innovations in the product from the homepage to results page. Her innovations have resulted in numerous patents for Microsoft spanning aggregation of categorized opinion data to different methods of previewing and displaying faceted search data. Upon returning from her second maternity leave, Mira has shifted her focus to design validation, prototyping and PM for horizontal user experience features.

Mira graduated from the University of Waterloo with degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics. She has worked as a developer at Quack.com in the silicon valley, which was acquired by AOL, and later at Nuance building speech-driven applications.

Outside of work Mira has a full plate as an artist, a mother of two, and outdoor enthusiast. Though her recent family additions have limited her to Rattlesnake Ledge, her outdoor pursuits have taken her from the mountaintop of Kilimanjaro, to Everest basecamp to backpacking around Asia.

Christina Koehn

User Experience Designer, Bing

Christina has been working professionally as a graphic designer since 2007 and is currently a User Experience Designer for Bing.com. Bing is Microsoft’s search engine and is changing the way that people think about search and finding information on the web.

Prior to this, Christina spent time working with the Microsoft Entertainment and Devices division on interface and information design for connected entertainment and for various print and web design agencies in the Seattle area. Her most recent projects at Bing include a redesign of the global visual language system, as well as many design iterations around html5, and the next generation of search.

Christina graduated from the University of Washington in 2007 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Communication Design and a minor in Art History. When not working, Christina loves to stay active by running and training for half marathons, playing volleyball, doing yoga and volunteering as a dog runner at the Seattle Humane Society and also enjoys traveling and reading about design and technology.

Goldie Chaudhuri

Program Manager

Goldie Chaudhuri joined Bing in the last year and has worked on Windows 8 and the Bing iPad app. She recently joined Bing Design as one of their first Program Managers, working on cross-device cross-team projects. Prior to Bing, Goldie worked on various experimental prototypes like Seadragon and Pivot at Live Labs and Spatial Databases at SQL Server.

Goldie graduated with majors in Computer Engineering and Studio Art from Case Western Reserve University, a weird but awesome campus spread out through 80 of Cleveland’s museums and non-profits. She grew up in Jacksonville, Florida and now lives in Capitol Hill where in her spare time she likes printmaking, soldering glowing costumes, geeking out about food and Belgian beers, wandering farmers markets and folk festivals, travelling, doing yoga, and biking around when it’s sunny.