Why I Do This I am passionate about designing beautiful systems that work for people. I like combining studied observation, high-yield language, and visual "aha" to bring order out of chaos and make life easier.
How I Work I am a systems and UX designer with a love of behavioral economics and interactive data visualization. I design rapidly and collaboratively, drawing from a wide toolkit of design research, creative writing, visual intuition, and quantitative modeling. I believe that well-designed data doesn’t look or feel like data at all. It empowers right brains and left brains alike to imagine and re-imagine new businesses, products, services, and experiences. The biggest compliment for me is: "Is this Excel?"
What I Come From My parents met at a Texas Instruments calculator plant in1976—Dad was the process engineer, Mom was the line manager. I started my career in large-scale commercial print in Dallas, then moved on to investment banking in New York before eventually moving into strategic finance for public universities in Austin and Oakland. After a stint as a grant-maker at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, I returned to the Bay Area as a principal designer for the design and innovation consultancy IDEO where I specialized in systems design and interactive data visualization, primarily in the education studio. I've since built a healthy design + strategy freelancing practice with design firms like IDEO and others.
Where I Studied In spring 2017, I received a master of interaction design from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Previously, I earned a master of business administration from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, which included a semester in luxury brand management at ESSEC Business School in Paris. Prior to that, I earned a bachelor in finance as well as a bachelor in print journalism at UT Austin. My design + strategy education took root while I was a principal designer at IDEO, and it has deepened through my work at other design firms like Sequence (now Salesforce Experience Design), Tomorrow Partners, COLLINS, frog design, and IDEO.org.
When I Have Time I am a luxury/fashion hobbyist. I have built and operated a handful of small consumer-facing startups in the luxury, fashion, and travel “lifestyle” markets. My favorite design quote is from Edward Tufte: "Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information." My favorite data visualization on the web is Years You Have Left to Live, Probably by Nathan Yau because it is full of motion and requires interaction to have meaning. My favorite work of contemporary art is Shapolsky et al. by Hans Haacke because it is data visualization of a social system and because it really irked the Guggenheim Board of Trustees.
Note from Dad: “About 1981 or early ‘82. I was the first consultant at Xerox Computer Services to do tele-commuting support for the world’s first commercially available cloud-based ERP systems. I bought a used Datapoint 3300 IBM Terminal clone with a blue 300 bps acoustic coupler modem. Our yellow AT&T ‘Princess’ phone didn’t seal well with the coupler, so I would use a moist dish towel to dampen (get it?) the room noise. But a certain two-year-old managed to utter a high-pitched waveform that was de-modulated into the main console command: IPL, meaning Initial Program Load (mainstream-speak for ctrl-alt-delete). The data center in Los Angeles had their hands full, having dropped about 250 customer connections for a few minutes while the System 370 re-booted itself. I called them at the data center, and they said something about a spurious signal from the Dallas node. I said something like ‘Oh! Strange!’ as if i had no clue.”
N.B. I also hope t-shirts like that are no longer sold in national parks, theme parks, or wherever that t-shirt came from in 1981–1982. I leave it here, un-Photoshopped, as a teachable moment for myself and others in my community because we need to see specific examples of what hurts and to understand that it’s been inculcated in our surroundings since birth. I stand in solidarity with the Black, Indigenous, and Person-of-Color community. The work to dismantle and unwind the original design of a nation needs doing. The work to re-design a nation for all needs doing. Let’s do the work.