You can see the long and short of it off to the right, but if you're really interested in more, I'm happy to indulge your rather peculiar need for more information. Keep reading below the fold (holy crap, but people don't read below the fold!) for more:
I'm M. Jackson Wilkinson, a technologist, designer, speaker, educator, and writer in San Francisco. I recently moved from Washington, DC to work as a Senior Product Designer at LinkedIn, and am happy to take your feedback. I'm from Philadelphia, went to Bowdoin College in Maine, root for the Phillies, and love to sing.
For some reason, there are always some people who wonder if they should call me "M." or something. For those of you, I encourage you to consider it to be a "silent M" and proceed with the rest of the name as usual. Folks tend to call me Jackson or Jack or some variant thereof.
Legally, I'm Michael Jackson Wilkinson, and yes, I was born the same year Thriller was released by Michael Jackson. Unfortunate. No, my parents didn't name me after the King of Pop, as Michael is my father's name, and Jackson is a family name on my mother's side, or so they claim. Growing up, I always considered changing my name, but now I think back to the words of the noble Michael Bolton: "Why should I change, he's the one who sucks."
I'm M. Jackson Wilkinson, a technologist, designer, speaker, educator, and writer from Washington, DC. When I say "from Washington, DC," I say that to mean "inside the beltway," as I live and work in the tiny City of Falls Church on the Virginia side of the river, about four miles from the District.
I hail from Philadelphia (and by that I mean the greater Philadelphia area, mainly Bucks County), and came to DC by way of Maine, where I attended Bowdoin College and majored in Music and Philosophy. My time in Pennsylvania and Maine had a really huge impact on me, owing to my love of the Phillies, choral music, snow, great debates, small towns, water ice, random intellectual indulgences, cheesesteaks, and rocky shorelines. No, I didn't ever actually take to lobster.
Nowadays, I work as a user experience strategist with the brilliant folks at Viget Labs, helping to make some of the highest-quality agency-produced websites anywhere. I focus on product design (what should this website actually do? what are the business goals?), user research (what do users need? how does what we've done work for real users?), and interface design (how should we structure the new site's interface? how does it fundamentally look?). It's a great opportunity to indulge in a ton of different disciplines and think critically about nearly every aspect of a website, and usher it toward success.
On the side, I do some projects of my own, including The Humble Gourmand, a food and drink magazine some friends and I publish monthly; and RecallCast, a web application to help you and your family protect yourselves from recalled food, products, and automobiles. These projects give me an opportunity to get into visual design and backend development, which I generally do in Django.
I'm also a member of the faculty at Boston University's Center for Digital Imaging Arts, teaching part-time classes on subjects relating to web design like CSS and project-oriented classes.
The rest of the time, I live with the amazing Ali Felski in our Falls Church apartment with our (her) dog Maggie, the coolest australian shepherd-schipperke mix I've ever met.