Kairos Power

Role and Scope

When the product is credibility, the design has to prove it.

I was the sole designer on a year-long website redesign for Kairos Power, a company developing advanced nuclear reactor technology. While the subject matter was highly technical, the core challenge wasn’t visual. It was helping a precise, engineering-driven organization communicate a complex story to a diverse audience that included investors, recruits, regulators, policymakers, and a public still learning how to think about next-generation nuclear energy.


As the project evolved, it became clear that the challenge extended beyond designing a few pages. Working alongside strategists, content leads, developers, and client stakeholders, I helped translate a constantly evolving narrative into a scalable digital system. I developed a modular framework capable of supporting new content, simplifying complex concepts, and reinforcing credibility through structure, clarity, and consistency. I also directed the site’s interactive and motion design, using AI-assisted workflows to accelerate production and focus more of my time on strategy, systems, and experience design.

My Contributions

Interaction Design

Interaction Design

Digital Experience Design

Digital Experience Design

Cross-Party Motion Production

Cross-Party Motion Production

Year

/

2026

Client

/

Kairos Power

Visit Website

The problem behind the problem


The brief looked like "design a website." The real problem was organizational and communicative.

Kairos's whole strategy is learning by building, proving a hard technology through real, successive demonstrations rather than asserting it. That makes credibility the product, and credibility is hard to manufacture when the people who hold the knowledge are engineers, the technology is difficult, and the audience ranges from regulators who need rigor to newcomers who need a way in. This was a full rebrand and redesign, and the client was learning about itself as we went, so requirements kept shifting through the build. The work was as much managing evolving scope as drawing screens the design had to stay coherent through continuous change, not just hold together at launch.

So the problem in front of me: how do you make a moving target of complex, high-stakes content legible and trustworthy, repeatably, with one designer?

Thinking in systems, not pages

What made the system more than a collection of templates was the way components were defined. A tab set could flex from one to many siblings, partnership content occupied an optional slot rather than requiring a separate pattern, and media regions were defined by role rather than medium, allowing images, video, animation, or data to be swapped without changing the underlying structure.

The deeper move was aligning the design system with the company’s own operating logic. Kairos develops its technology through iterative, modular stages, and the system follows the same principle: repeatable units capable of scaling, adapting, and evolving over time. For an engineering-driven organization that trusts structure, the design itself became part of the argument for credibility rather than simply a vehicle for communicating it.

01 Key Decision
Translating complexity

The reactor was the hardest thing to explain and the most important thing to get right. Rather than relying on a dense technical diagram, I developed the visual approach and storyboards for an interactive experience that moves from the reactor vessel down to a single fuel particle, revealing one layer at a time. Working closely with a motion partner, I directed both the interaction and motion design to make a highly technical system easier to understand without oversimplifying it.


Because the technology was still evolving, the work required close coordination between the client, motion studio, and internal team. I used AI-assisted workflows to track feedback, compare versions, and surface areas where assumptions had started to diverge. Throughout the process, we balanced storytelling with performance, ensuring the experience remained smooth, clear, and engaging.

01 Key Decision
Translating complexity

The reactor was the hardest thing to explain and the most important thing to get right. Rather than relying on a dense technical diagram, I developed the visual approach and storyboards for an interactive experience that moves from the reactor vessel down to a single fuel particle, revealing one layer at a time. Working closely with a motion partner, I directed both the interaction and motion design to make a highly technical system easier to understand without oversimplifying it.


Because the technology was still evolving, the work required close coordination between the client, motion studio, and internal team. I used AI-assisted workflows to track feedback, compare versions, and surface areas where assumptions had started to diverge. Throughout the process, we balanced storytelling with performance, ensuring the experience remained smooth, clear, and engaging.

01 Key Decision
Translating complexity

The reactor was the hardest thing to explain and the most important thing to get right. Rather than relying on a dense technical diagram, I developed the visual approach and storyboards for an interactive experience that moves from the reactor vessel down to a single fuel particle, revealing one layer at a time. Working closely with a motion partner, I directed both the interaction and motion design to make a highly technical system easier to understand without oversimplifying it.


Because the technology was still evolving, the work required close coordination between the client, motion studio, and internal team. I used AI-assisted workflows to track feedback, compare versions, and surface areas where assumptions had started to diverge. Throughout the process, we balanced storytelling with performance, ensuring the experience remained smooth, clear, and engaging.

02 Key Decision
Showing a cycle on one clear path

The roadmap arrived as a styling update request and was really an information-architecture problem: how do you show a cyclical plan-design-build-test process inside a linear, left-to-right timeline that still holds up on a phone? I used Claude Code to compress the exploration, turning the client's scattered prior versions, kickoff notes, and sketches into navigable, responsive-aware directions in a fraction of the time, which freed me to spend the hours on the real problem. The resolution: a linear progression of reactors with the cycle rendered as a literal loop between each stage, the legend folded into mobile tooltips, and the commercial fleet made the visual endpoint. The tool compressed the production; the linear-versus-cyclical call was the judgment.



02 Key Decision

Showing a cycle on on clear path

For a company whose entire value is being believed, the question was never whether to show proof but which proof, and in what order. I treated the page as a sequenced argument — NRC permits, national-lab partnerships, the Google and TVA agreements, hard operating numbers — surfacing each one where a skeptical reader had the context to absorb it, and letting the module schema carry that evidence in the same slots on every facility. The schema made the surfacing systematic; deciding what actually counts as proof stayed a human, editorial call. The discipline was restraint — resisting the urge to show everything at once, which to a wary audience reads as protesting too much.

03 Key Decision
What proof to surface, and when

For a company whose value depends on credibility, the challenge wasn’t whether to show proof, it was deciding which proof mattered most and when to introduce it. Working alongside content strategists and the client, we agreed to approach the pages as a sequenced reveal, surfacing evidence such as their detailed reactor renderings, NRC permits, national lab partnerships, the Google and TVA agreements, and key operating metrics at moments where readers had enough context to understand why they mattered.


The modular system made that evidence easy to scale and repeat across facilities, but deciding what actually constituted proof remained a human judgment. The discipline was restraint. Showing everything at once risks overwhelming a skeptical audience, while revealing evidence progressively helps build understanding and trust.

03 Key Decision

What proof to surface, and when

For a company whose entire value is being believed, the question was never whether to show proof but which proof, and in what order. I treated the page as a sequenced argument — NRC permits, national-lab partnerships, the Google and TVA agreements, hard operating numbers — surfacing each one where a skeptical reader had the context to absorb it, and letting the module schema carry that evidence in the same slots on every facility. The schema made the surfacing systematic; deciding what actually counts as proof stayed a human, editorial call. The discipline was restraint — resisting the urge to show everything at once, which to a wary audience reads as protesting too much.

Outcome + public stakes

The site launched in January 2026. Rather than cite engagement metrics I can't independently verify, here are the outcomes worth noting.

The system absorbed continuous change: because the client kept discovering its own story, requirements moved the whole way through, and the schema let new sections and facilities drop into the same structure instead of forcing a re-architecture each time, it's what allowed me to keep pace with a moving target. The Kairos engineering team signed off on technical accuracy, the outcome that mattered most for a client whose value is being believed. The interactive and motion assets shipped and are live, the three-party process held to delivery, and the site's structure teaches an accurate mental model of how Kairos actually develops its technology.

Public stakes context, not outcomes the site necessarily caused, but still important markers: The work had to perform under real scrutiny. In this period Kairos earned the first NRC construction permit for a Generation IV reactor, signed an agreement with Google to deploy 500 MW by 2035, and reached the first U.S. utility power-purchase agreement for an advanced reactor, with TVA. Those partners, investors, and regulators were precisely the audiences the site had to convince, which is why credibility, not decoration, was the brief.

Reflection


The hardest parts of this project weren’t design problems. They were the moments when the engineers, agency team, and motion studio each thought they were talking about the same thing and slowly weren’t. For a stretch, my role became less about designing screens and more about keeping meaning intact as the technology, story, and requirements evolved.


I used to think of translation as a byproduct of design work. On this project, it became the work itself. What I’m proudest of here is the judgment, synthesis, and ability to create alignment.


Next work

View project