Daniel Lucas Dossier

The Stanford Accelerator for Learning is a premiere group working on the learning challenges most in need of new discoveries, evidence, and solutions. Across six areas of focus, the Accelerator bridges research and practice to generate knowledge, develop guidance, and prototype tools. A collaborative group, the Accelerator works with faculty across the university, key industry partners, schools, and other NGOs around the world.

In my role as lead on special projects, I was tapped to design and develop the digital presence of the Accelerator. I translated its shifting organizational structure and broad mission into a friendly and legible design that rides the line of Stanford’s firm brand requirements. The design uses color to subtly help visitors distinguish between content types, while light touch interactions and collages bring a sense of playfulness and delight.

To support a small and growing team, I built a custom WordPress backend designed around editor experience — keeping the mental overhead of publishing low so a busy staff could run their own communications without a developer in the loop. For visitors, I coded a frontend that meets rigorous WCAG standards, ensuring access for users of all abilities — a non-negotiable for an equity-minded organization.

The design has carried the Accelerator through five years and dramatic growth from a young initiative to one of Stanford’s flagship efforts in learning science. To celebrate its fifth anniversary, I am leading a reimagining of the site – built for what the organization has become and where it is going.

Dakarai Akil is a collage artist whose compositions combine color, emotion, and imagery from Black culture in intimate explorations of Afrosurrealism and its cultural reverberations. His work invites viewers into Black culture: a world that is rich, historically significant, and still underexplored.

To extend this invitation and highlight the stories his source material holds, I worked with Dakarai to create an interactive collage creator. The website has a simple CMS where Dakarai uploads collage fragments from his material catalog and a frontend where visitors can place pieces on a canvas, creating their own Dakarai-influenced collages. The canvas starts with a randomly generated collage so visitors begin with inspiration rather than a blank page.

We added a sharing function so visitors could send their unique collages to friends and the download function lets anyone create a custom collage for their desktop, phone background, or to share on Instagram. Shared and downloaded collages are saved to a database, creating a living archive of the ways visitors have remixed Dakarai’s material.

Since launching, Dakarai has used the site to run multiple digital-first campaigns, calling on his audience to make and share their creations. What began as a way to explore his material has become a venue for his practice, a space to engage with his audience, and an extension of his efforts to uplift the Black community.

Every family interacts with dozens of different systems, each with its own portal, time-sensitive demands, and records. This means home repair projects, vehicle maintenance, budget tracking, vacation planning, contact information, and other life management information can’t talk to each other — and it’s hard to see how they inform and interact.

I decided to prototype a fix: a single desktop app that would give my wife and me visibility across every part of our shared life. I began by chatting with Claude to define requirements, landing on an architecture of one module per area — property, vehicles, library, vacations, contacts — and on ways to leverage real-world data streams like SF property data and airport codes. This kept the product lean and flexible from the start.

To move swiftly from spec to working product, I used Claude Design to generate mockups that we then iterated on, refining needs and experimenting with aesthetic choices and information layouts. This visual-first process was a key methodological decision: by designing the interface first, I could see exactly what data the app actually needed, and let that define the database schema. From there I directed multiple Claude Code agents in parallel, building module by module with manual review and clean up as needed to ensure DRY principles and cohesion across the codebase.

We are now using the app to manage a home renovation, health records for our newborn, a birthday trip, and maintenance schedules for two vehicles. Everything runs locally on a shared machine on our home network — our family’s information never leaves the house. As we use it, my wife and I are reviewing what works and what we wish existed, and reshaping it as we go. Most importantly, we are using the insights available to us to make informed and clear-eyed decisions about our family.

OpenSF History is an archive of over 52,000 images of San Francisco dating back to 1840. Built in 2014, the website is a leading and open resource for city agencies, researchers, educators, artists, and anyone with a curiosity about how the city has changed.

Originally created as a side-project, the archive has grown via organic and volunteer-driven development, leading to an unmaintainable codebase, thorny database, and brittle infrastructure. The result is that a backlog of new material has not been made public since 2022.

To unblock this tremendous resource, I’m leading a redesign and rebuild that retains beloved features (the map) and adds sorely needed ones (date range) while simplifying the design to focus more on what matters most: the images. Alongside this, I worked with Claude to untangle the database and architect a new and holistic schema.

With a modernized interface, versioned codebase, and structured database, this newly stabilized version of OpenSF History will soon resume its expansion, ensuring its future as a prominent and evolving public resource for all of us.

Originally planned as an in-person residency and slate of dance performances, Tamara Chu’s project The Roads We Walk Together was turned upside down by the 2020 pandemic. In response, Tamara and her collaborators began creating choreography using Zoom recordings and private audio recordings.

In support of this pivot, I collaborated with Tamara to create a digital and conceptual experience of the material she and the dancers were making. The site needed to feel intimate and lightly restrictive, the way a small venue shapes a performance. That conviction drove the central decision to time-gate the site so it’s only ‘open’ from 5pm to 5am daily, asking visitors to come on the work’s terms rather than their own. I created a dynamic, type-forward design that carries the poetic story while serving as a canvas for the photography, video, and images Tamara and her collaborators were creating.

To heighten the site’s focus on private moments, I designed an interaction where the entire site changes once a visitor reaches the bottom of the site. This moment triggers a host of visual changes and unveils buttons and interactive elements that lead visitors to videos, voice memos, and stories from Tamara’s collaborators. This unconventional choice represented a commitment to visitors – rewarding their patience and curiosity.

The Roads We Walk Together was the first collaborative project between Tamara and me and would lead to the creation of cunning folk, the digital design team living inside Problem Library. It is also a clear expression of my belief that websites can serve and engage visitors in ways that most digital products avoid: through poetry, friction, and delight.