Joakim Kuusemaa

Principal Product Designer · Complex Products & Systems

I make complex products coherent. I define the product model—objects, relationships, workflows, states, and behavior—and carry it through interaction design into working software. My practice spans twenty years, including founding design ownership at SOCi and the ventures that preceded it.

Tartu, Estonia · EET / EEST NN/g UX Certified Tartu Art School — Design joakimkuusemaa@gmail.com Résumé Résumé (PDF)

Projects

Rästik

Planar-magnetic design software

Product direction, interaction design & development · 2026

A browser-based product for designing planar-magnetic headphone drivers, from material selection and conductor geometry to magnet arrays and fabrication patterns. Changing a design updates its modelled field, force, mass, resistance, and material cost in the same workbench.

Material presets, parameter comparisons, and fabrication exports support the move from a design to a physical prototype. The product runs locally without dependencies or a network connection; its calculations expose material assumptions and model limits alongside the results.

Materials to pattern

From film and magnets to the conductor pattern that gets etched.

Field-led design

The conductor follows the magnetic field; its wiring is solved for you.

Fabrication checks

Buildability checks and plotter toolpaths beside the design.

Markmaker

Creative production tooling

Product direction & toolchain design · 2025

Markmaker is an image-to-plotter production toolchain: automated plate separation, tracing workflows, image-to-SVG conversion, toolpath generation, and direct communication with the plotter. Each plate receives its own flow, stipple, or hatch strategy, keeping image decomposition and physical mark-making independently controllable. The desktop system drives a 1350 mm plotter.

Image to plates

Any image separated into plates, each one editable.

Mark languages

Hatch, stipple, screentone and woodcut-style treatments, plate by plate.

Machine control

Toolpaths and direct control of a 1350 mm plotter.

Conflux

Enterprise platform

Product & UI design · 2011

A CRM and project-management software upgrade, bringing contacts, documents, tasks, calendars, workflows and mail into one workspace. Shared navigation, list and detail views connect the different parts of the product.

Sortable data tables at scale, a calendar handling overlapping and multi-day events, workflow objects with dependency chains and Gantt views, and scoped global search.

One workspace

Contacts, documents, tasks, calendars, workflows and mail together.

Dependency chains

Dependencies, progress and Gantt views on every workflow.

Data at scale

Sortable tables and scoped search across the whole product.

FanGate Media

Interactive social applications

Product & interaction design · 2012

Interactive tools for polling, discussion, quizzes and fan competitions, built for Facebook’s embedded-app ecosystem. Custom applications brought branded experiences into Facebook pages and connected participation with the social feed.

Clients included Ryan Seacrest, Larry King and Kesha. FanGate Media was one of the ventures I co-founded that became SOCi.

Inside the page

Polls, quizzes, discussions and fan competitions inside Facebook pages.

Branded experiences

Custom apps bringing each client’s brand into its Facebook page.

Back into the feed

Every vote, entry and answer travelling back into the social feed.

Tailogic

Product configurator

Product & UI design · 2018

Online tailoring engine with integrated e-commerce, built for Harvest & Frost. Customers configure a garment against a live render — fabric, contrast, collar, cuff, pocket, embroidery, buttons, buttonholes, and threads — and the configuration resolves into a factory-ready production order.

Several hundred garment details and configuration rules shaped both the render and production specification. Scope covered the configurator, catalogue, dealer flow, and operational workflows for order assembly, logistics, and invoicing. The system also ran for Sangar, Oma Line, and Schoffa.

Live configurator

Garments configured fabric by fabric against a live render.

Rules to production

Hundreds of garment rules resolved into factory-ready orders.

One engine, several brands

Harvest & Frost, Sangar, Oma Line and Schoffa.

Signwise

Digital identity

Product & UI design · 2014

E-identity and digital-signature platform for cross-border contracts on Estonian ID-card infrastructure with Guardtime timestamping. Signing, co-signing and signature requests, document workflows, administration, and dashboards made a cryptographic and legal process legible to people completing everyday contract work.

Cross-border signing

Contracts signed across borders on Estonian e-identity.

Timestamped signatures

Guardtime timestamping on every signature.

Legible validity

A cryptographic and legal process made legible for everyday contracts.

Estonian National Museum

Exhibition production

Mannequin production, procurement & 3D work · 2015

Mannequin production and procurement: photogrammetry, 3D modelling, fabrication coordination and installation. Named in the museum’s exhibition credits for the mannequins in Echo of the Urals.

Scan to figure

Photogrammetry and 3D modelling for exhibition figures.

Procurement

Mannequin procurement and fabrication coordination.

Installation

Figures installed in Echo of the Urals.

Rippol & early television interfaces

Video discovery

GUI, UX & interaction design · 2008

I designed and built Rippol’s GUI, UX, and interaction model for navigating video from multiple sources. During the same period, I designed video-on-demand catalogue, navigation, and playback interfaces for set-top boxes and remote-control use.

Rippol brought personalised video discovery and social activity into one place. Its later lightweight edition let people browse before signing in; following a show could notify them when a new episode became available.

Multi-source video

Video from many sources in one discovery interface.

Social viewing

Friends’ activity and followed shows alongside discovery.

Living-room TV

Video-on-demand interfaces for set-top boxes and remote control.

Mashable coverage · TechCrunch, 2009 · Product announcement, 2009

Résumé

Experience
2023–Independent Principal Product Designer — Estonia/EU. Product direction, product architecture, interaction design, and working-product development across media, learning, energy decision support, and physical production.
2009–21Founding Product Designer — SOCi & predecessor ventures, United States (remote). Shaped the product from its first surfaces across product architecture, interaction design, research, reporting and analytics, content systems, and the cross-product design system.
2018–19Product design consultant — Tailogic OÜ, Tallinn. Made-to-order garment configurator for Harvest & Frost, resolving hundreds of rules into factory-ready production data.
2015–16Mannequin production, procurement & 3D work — Estonian National Museum, Tartu. Photogrammetry, 3D modelling, fabrication coordination and installation.
2014–15Product / UI/UX designer — Signwise, Tallinn. E-identity and digital-signature platform on Estonian infrastructure.
2008–09Designer — Rippol, Inc., United States (remote). Designed and built the GUI, UX, and interaction model for an early multi-source video product.
2006–07Interface designer — Hydranode Project (open source). Designed the UX/UI and interaction model for a headless, multi-network peer-to-peer client.
2006–09Earlier — Designed several early set-top-box video-on-demand interfaces; VFX compositing for the feature film Detsembrikuumus (Ars Machina); magazine layout and art direction (Sünnimaa).
Education
2002–08Tartu Art School — Artistic Design; vocational secondary education, design.
Certification
2021Nielsen Norman Group — UX Certification — 8 courses, 5 examinations.
Product practice
Product architecture · interaction design · information architecture · Figma, Framer, Adobe Creative Cloud · design systems and component libraries · dashboards and data-dense interfaces · configuration systems · user research and usability testing · prototyping and design-to-engineering collaboration.
AI & agentic competency
Claude Code and Cursor · specification and decomposition · agent-assisted prototyping and implementation · debugging, code review, and evaluation of working product behavior.
Languages
Estonian (native) · English (fluent).
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