Designer, painter, and public servant. I make meaningful things for people.

I'm Geoff. I'm Head of Design at Tavus, where we're designing multimodal AI that communicates the way people do: with perception, memory, natural conversation, facial expressiveness, and other hallmarks of face-to-face human communication that let people know they're being understood – truly meeting humans where they are, in the most natural way we can make that happen.

We call it "human computing," and believe it's the future of human-computer interaction, that the more natural the interaction, and the more people AI works for, and the more useful it becomes to us all.

Before Tavus, I spent 11 years at Google, the last five on the company's flagship AI as it evolved from Assistant to Bard to Gemini. I joined the Bard team in its early days and grew a tip-of-the-spear UX team that designed Gemini tool use, Deep Research, agentic Gemini, and the integration of Gemini in countless Google products from Workspace to Chrome and beyond.

I like to think I'm less nerdy than I probably am, but I was all up in the guts of our first family computer – a PC XT clone we made with help from a friend – when I was 11. I spent a fair amount of my earlier childhood playing King's Quest on that PC, Wolfenstein on my friend's Apple IIe, Pitfall and its likes on my Atari 2600, and, to my parents' chagrin, taking apart small appliances like our home phone to see how they worked.

I went to a Cistercian all-boys school in Texas where I learned Latin, how to think critically, read thoroughly, and write carefully – but also how to code in Basic in 6th grade. The fun of it was surpassed only by the rarity of the experience in 1983. So I was a nerd, and I still am.

I'm also a painter. I have BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA from the University of Oregon. I taught painting and drawing at SCAD for four years. Around 1999 I started helping fine arts students put their portfolios on CD-ROMs and websites. One thing led to another, and in 2001 I moved to Pittsburgh to help build one of the first web design degree programs in the country, at Robert Morris University.

I left teaching in 2005, spent a couple of years at a startup, built UX at Elliance, consulted at Google, led some Design & Research at MAYA, co-organized UX Pittsburgh, and mentored startups at AlphaLab. In 2016 I joined Google full-time, and spent roughly the next decade designing for ambient, natural language computing on Shopping, Assistant, Bard, and finally Gemini.

In my personal life, I serve on the Quaker Valley School Board, where I am the Vice President and Chair of the Finance committee, currently focused on building a new high school – a ~$120M project that will last 100 years and be home to the education of tens of thousands of kids long after I'm gone. Superficially, this work bears little resemblance to my work in tech, but it's powered by the same drive: To make meaningful things for people, at whatever timescale matters.

Time's been exceptionally tight since, oh, November 2022, but I still paint when I can. I paint almost entirely from observation: produce, flatware, cardboard, studio clutter, my daughter's toys – humble subjects that demand focus to find splendor in the mundane. Painting tunes my eye, clears my mind, and calms my spirit.

Here are a few paintings right here on this site, or you can see a bunch more at geoffbarnesart.com.