Driving slowly down a two-lane road in the Tahoe National Forest.

Data tells you what.

People tell you why.

I design and run mixed-methods research to determine what should exist before anyone knows what to build.

Two hikers help a third hiker make sure his backpack is sitting on his back correctly at the Volcanoes National Park.

Before a technical team can train for helpfulness, appropriate autonomy, good memory, or collaboration, I study what those behaviors mean in real life, where their boundaries change, and how to tell whether a system is actually helping or merely scoring well.

I turn lived human context into behavioral taxonomies, scenarios, rubrics, and evaluations that inform model and product decisions.

My methods were born studying cognitive science at UC San Diego, battle-tested at MTV, sharpened in business school, standardized at IDEO, and refined across dozens of organizations worldwide through Nobox.

Current research

Co-designing an evidence-grounded report-drafting system with a clinician: translating her terminology and judgment into system rules, with stage-level, held-out, and human-reviewed evals to catch plausible-but-wrong outputs.

Tiffany J. Hopkins photo by Kirby Stenger

Hi, I’m Tiffany.

I am, first and foremost, curious. My curiosity has taken me from Viacom boardrooms to farm stalls in Uganda to an auditorium full of professional psychics. Every hard problem I've come across has introduced me to smart, caring people who know their stuff but are spinning their wheels. I help them find a new way of seeing things by shifting focus from what to who. I use contextual, applied research methods to develop relational intelligence: the capacity to see not just what the data shows, but what it means for the people in it.

photo by Kirby Stenger

PARTNERS & CLIENTS

IDEO

Hachette Book Group

Y LABS

Penrose Brands

IDEO.ORG

TOMORROW PARTNERS

Design for Wildlife

Luminary Lab

IDEO • Hachette Book Group • Y LABS • Penrose Brands • IDEO.ORG • TOMORROW PARTNERS • Design for Wildlife • Luminary Lab •