about me
I’m a lousy drummer, so-so hockey player, and an expert skier. But the thing I do best is collaborate with smart people to solve tough design problems.
Third grade
Steamboat Springs, CO
I’ve worked professionally as a UX strategist and designer for over ten years. Over that time, I’ve come to understand that what differentiates a designer is not their process, but their principles. That is, how-to is less important to evolving as a designer than why-to.
Here are a few of the principles that guide my work:
The greatest value a designer can provide for end-users is to give them time back in their lives.
True collaboration is made up of equal parts generosity and bravery. The generosity it requires is not just in the giving over of our best ideas, but in receiving from others great ideas that aren’t our own. Bravery allows us to admit when we don’t know the answer to something and commit to working together to find the answer.
Human emotion in design isn’t something that we just sprinkle on at the end of the design process by adding delightful micro-interactions and surprising microcopy. It must be woven deeply into the core of a design solution by fundamentally understanding the moments in a user’s journey that matter the most.
We shouldn’t just design digital products and services to be accessible for people with limited abilities. We should make them convenient and pleasurable, and meaningful.
I write articles
From time to time, when I’ve got a little break in the action, I enjoying writing about the craft and culture of design and sharing my thoughts with the design commons which has been so generous to me along the way. You can read more about my process and how I approach UX design & strategy.
I Also teach college
I get a tremendous amount of nourishment from mentoring and teaching. I’ve been very fortunate to find myself in several great opportunities to teach in a formal setting. During graduate school at Parsons, I had several opportunities as a TA in both undergraduate and graduate level courses.
In my second year in the MFA Design + Technology program at Parsons, I was among six teaching fellows selected to teach the three-week summer boot-camp for all income first-year students to the program.
Bard College - Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
More recently, I developed and taught a course for the Bard Prison Initiative titled Introduction to User-Centered Design. For fifteen weeks in the fall of 2018, I spent most of my Wednesdays inside the computer-lab classroom at Fishkill State Prison in upstate New York. I took a class of fifteen students through a broad overview of the precepts and practices of user-centered design thinking, methodologies, techniques and tools.
This transformative program from Bard College was the subject of the recent PBS documentary College Behind Bars. It was a true honor to be a part of BPI while living in New York.
The New School, Parsons School For Design - New York, NY
In the fall of 2019, I developed an exciting new course to teach in the spring of 2020 called Fundamentals of Interaction Design for my alma mater, Parsons. This nine-week course of the second of three courses in the User Centered Design Certificate program offered by Parsons Online.
This course provides a broad overview and orientation of the precepts, principles and methods surrounding the user-centered interaction design process with a focus on the impact of design on usability, inclusiveness, and the creation of meaningful connections between digital products and services and the people for whom they are designed.