Hi! I'm Tim Sheiner.

I grew up in Mill Valley, California and graduated from Tam High in 1983. I went back east for college to Harvard, traveled for a year in South and Southeast Asia after, then came home to do a Masters in Product Design at Stanford.

I finished Stanford, taught English in Barcelona for a while, then returned to San Francisco, met my wife Kelly and for the last 25 years we've been living in Bernal Heights and raising our 3 boys, Benjamin, Jacob, and Max. Now with them mostly out of the house, Kelly and I are planning to spend more time at our other place in Salida, Colorado.

Personal

My hobbies are being outdoors, building stuff and writing about design.

Being outdoors is good. Being there with family or friends is better.

This panorama of my backyard shows some of my home construction projects: an outdoor kitchen, my design studio, deck, graffiti wall and the pavers all around.

See more images of my projects and travels on Instagram

Eventually I plan to publish my design articles as a book.

Read my writing on Medium

Origin Story

1991 - I graduated from Stanford with a Master's in Product Design. The name of the program has evolved since then; the philosophy of radical creativity has stayed constant. Below are images from my thesis work: bowls for Jello and a wheelchair braking system.

1992 - I worked for a medical products start up for 2 years. I designed product, packaging, assembly line robots and managed regulatory approval.

1995 - I started designing for the World Wide Web. LINC was the name of my design consultancy; we designed and built "intranets."

1999 - I cycled through a music start up where we tried to be iTunes before the world was ready, then had my first corporate work experience at Schwab.

2001 - I spent 5 years at consultancy that used what we now call AI to optimize drug development. Here I learned about data, data visualization, statistics, and designed software for modeling, simulation and decision theory.

That's the backstory.

Checkout my more recent work or learn about the values I bring to work.