Gail Thynes at the 2022 HCDE Graduation & Awards Ceremony
Photo courtesy of Junchao Yang

The Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering presents the 2022 Mikey Award to HCDE alumna Gail Thynes.

The Myron L. White Award, or the Mikey Award, is named after the co-founder of the department. It is presented annually by HCDE faculty to leaders in the field and dedicated friends of the department. 

Gail Thynes is a vibrant design leader in the tech industry in Seattle, WA. Currently working at Microsoft as a Senior Product Designer, Gail designs enterprise-scale security tools to make life easier for millions of customers and protect the world's cloud infrastructure.
 
What inspires Thynes most about design? "The people we meet, the stories we tell, and the problems we solve." Her passion projects often center on fostering thriving creative communities. She believes deeply in the power of making meaningful connections to identify opportunities, find inspiration, and gain collaborators.
 
A passionate mentor, Thynes guides students in the transition from school to industry, helps build successful design careers, and coaches junior designers into tomorrow’s leaders. In pursuit of this passion, she founded the Microsoft + HCDE Mentorship program, which paired students with a member of the Microsoft design community for one-on-one career coaching and is now an industry-wide mentorship program.
 
As part of her career transition from fashion merchandising into design, Thynes graduated from HCDE with a bachelor’s degree in 2015. Thynes maintains a strong connection with the HCDE department, where she recently established the Diversity in Design Scholarship and returned as an affiliate instructor earlier this year.

Julie Kientz, Professor and Chair of the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering, presented Thynes with the Mikey Award at the 2022 Graduation & Awards Ceremony on June 8, 2022. 

View Gail Thynes accepting the 2022 Mikey Award in the ceremony recording below.