About

DESIGN PHILOSOPHY

My goal as a user experience designer is to create a conversation between people and the products and systems they interact with. The conversation begins when we go out in the field and find the people who use (or will use) our design. We watch and listen and try to understand how the product fits within the context of their lives. As a team we sift through the data, constructing models and arguing in front of whiteboards until we uncover the handful of requirements that will make-or-break our design. Then we concentrate all our creative effort nailing down those requirements, exploring and expressing our ideas through sketches, storyboards, and prototypes. We test, we fail, and we go back to the drawing board.

We make compromises but our final design always presents a clear, consistent experience to our community of users. We show restraint by fulfilling just the requirements and nothing more. We show empathy by allowing participation and control but within a constrained set of parameters that buffer the participants from confusion and failure.

What emerges is a design that is a pure expression of a vision that matches and exceeds our participants expectations.

BUILDING A COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE

As a graduate student I breathed new life into my school's HCI community as an executive officer in our SIGCHI chapter SOCHI (Student Organization for Human Computer Interaction). We held design jams, sponsored by Mozilla Labs and local firms TechSmith and Zattoo, where students, given a design challenge, worked in small groups to brainstorm and sketch design solutions on whiteboards. I led several initiatives including launching a new blog-like website and reinvigorating the organization's brand by sponsoring a t-shirt and logo design contest. In addition to blogging on the site I also maintained a comprehensive list of HCI resources on the organization's delicious account.

PERSONAL

As a kid growing up in Fort Worth, Texas I had the pleasure of taking art classes at the Kimbell Art Museum, a masterpiece of 20th century architecture designed by Louis Kahn. In high school I spent my junior year on medical rotations, observing open heart surgeries, cesarean sections, and patients in the last stages of Alzheimer's disease (I fainted my first day of my surgery rotations!) After a two year stint at Smith College I transferred to the Rhode Island School of Design to study art full time. There I made paintings based on 18th century French wallpaper designs, took critical theory classes, and worked at the Museum of Art. After I graduated I helped catalog the museum's entire costume & textiles collection. It is still the best job I've ever had.

I moved to San Francisco in 2004 and soon got a job as a digital archivist at local office of the architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, leaving the firm in 2007 to attend graduate school. Now that I'm out of school I hope to build on what I learned as a student by continuing developing in Drupal and tinkering in Arduino. When I'm not hunched over a computer I enjoy going to museums, running half-marathons, and hiking & camping in the Bay Area.