Design as how a team finds the right problem.

I have spent sixteen years working at the seams between human-centered design and the engineering, product, and operations worlds it has to live inside; that translation is the throughline of my career. I started in safety-critical environments, building human-machine interfaces for control rooms and operations centers where a misread display carried real consequences. That is where I learned that design is not decoration; it is how a team finds the right problem before spending a year solving the wrong one.

Over time I moved from designing the interfaces to building the systems that let design teams do their best work: standing up DesignOps functions from zero, shaping intake, governance, and delivery rhythms, and embedding human-centered practice inside engineering-driven organizations at scale. I came to it by an unusual route, an MFA in Intermedia (a discipline built around working across mediums, systems, and boundaries), which is probably why I gravitate toward the places where disciplines have to cooperate instead of compete.

I lead as a player-coach: close enough to the craft to keep quality high, and far enough back to build the conditions that let a whole team do good work. What I care about now is what I cared about at the start: complex, high-stakes systems where how people and technology meet decides whether the whole thing works, and the conditions that let good design actually happen inside them.