I believe that everyone has the right to joy, connection, creativity, opportunity, dignity, and freedom. The work I do is in service of making this a reality, at scale, using the tools of research, design, and technology.
I build digital products designed to improve services and influence systems change using mixed methods research and human centered design. I’m known for confidently jumping into any part of the end to end research and design process, finding creative ways to learn about opportunities, and launching innovative products and services with multidisciplinary teams of researchers, designers, data scientists, engineers, product owners, and business stakeholders.
I spent 7 years at Code for America looking at the ways that technology and design can restore opportunities for those impacted by our criminal justice system. During that time, I co-founded Clear My Record at Code for America, a project that automates the process of clearing old marijuana convictions from one’s criminal record so that they qualify for jobs, housing, and other opportunities. Our work on Clear My Record has lead to over 144,000 marijuana convictions being automatically removed from people’s records across California, and many more soon. Over 15,000 people no longer have a criminal record at all because of this work and now states across the US are implementing automatic record clearance policies that would not have been possible without this technology.
Check out Huffington Post’s feature of a day in my life at Code for America, or listen to my interview on the Five-O-One podcast.
Now, I’m a senior user researcher at Spotify, working on music technology. My focus now is centered on healing communities through sound, dance, and art. During the moments in between, you’ll find me speaking about my work publicly, recording audio interviews to capture my family’s ancestry, salsa dancing around California, DJing and curating music in New York City, and painting in my studio in Harlem.
-Jazmyn Latimer