I believe the best design starts with understanding people.

I’ve always been fascinated by the human experience. Why we feel what we feel. How our surroundings shape us. How our choices affect other people and the world around us. I’m deeply empathetic, intensely curious, and probably incapable of simply accepting that something “just works that way.” I want to understand the why underneath it. That curiosity has followed me through art, design, technology, and more than a few wonderfully nerdy rabbit holes.

Long before I called myself a UX designer, I was already experimenting with how interaction could create emotion and meaning. In college, I created Interactive Life, an immersive installation using Xbox Kinect and projectors. As participants physically walked through the projected environment, the plants and animals around them began to die. Reversing their movement allowed the environment to rebuild. The experience made people participants in the story rather than observers of it. Their actions had consequences they could immediately experience.

That idea later evolved into an interactive tabletop museum piece exploring pollution and the impact our everyday choices can have at a local level. Looking back, the connection to my career now feels almost suspiciously obvious. Before I knew the vocabulary of UX, I was already thinking about interaction, behavior, feedback, cause and effect, technology, and how an experience could make an idea felt rather than simply explained.

As my art evolved, so did the way I shared it. My Looking Up work brings the making process into public spaces, where people experience the work as it happens, hear the story behind it, ask questions, and become part of a moment that disappears when I leave. I’m as interested in that experience around the art as I am in the finished piece.

That same curiosity runs through my design practice. I’m fascinated by the journeys people take, the systems surrounding them, and all the small interactions that shape how an experience feels. Whether I’m making art or designing a complex system, I’m thinking about people moving through an experience, how each moment connects to the next, and how thoughtful design can make that experience more human, useful, and accessible.

My art and design practices have evolved in parallel. One gives me freedom to experiment with emotion, participation, and impermanence. The other gives me tools to turn observation and empathy into structure, systems, and experiences that can make everyday life a little better.

Art exercises my intuition. Design gives that intuition structure.

I started closer to the interface, designing individual interactions and experiences. Over time, my work expanded outward—to research, journeys, information architecture, strategy, systems, facilitation, and delivery. That evolution taught me that the most interesting design opportunities often exist beyond the artifact we were originally asked to create.

Today, I’m often at my best when the answer isn’t obvious yet. I help teams understand what’s really being asked, find the connections, establish a direction, and make ideas tangible. I move between strategy and hands-on design, zooming out to understand the larger experience and back into the details when they determine whether it actually works. As a leader, I facilitate, mentor, create structure, advocate for quality and accessibility, and still make alongside the team.

I’m now evolving that practice around AI, rapid experimentation, and new ways of making. I’m exploring AI-assisted prototyping, code-enabled design, conversational and agentic experiences, and human–AI interaction—not simply to make faster, but to ask new questions about trust, control, transparency, accessibility, and what these technologies should enable for people. I’m building on the designer I’ve become while continuing to explore what experience design can become next.