Hello there!

I'm a product designer who thinks in systems — less interested in what a screen looks like than in why it exists, how the pieces underneath it hold together, and whether people can actually trust it. That's taken me from a three-screen prototype to a founding-designer role, and from a university research project to an ML platform that earned 95% adoption inside a skeptical institution.

I still can't look at a product without asking why it exists — and lately, why now — before I let myself get excited about what it should be. It's a compulsion.

Most recently that's pulled me toward a harder question: what guardrails and accessibility should look like as AI decides more of what people see, trust, and act on. Building an enterprise ML platform that had to earn trust inside a cautious institution, and a media-literacy tool built on the idea that people should be equipped to judge for themselves, taught me the same lesson twice — the interface is rarely the hard part. Deciding who the system should defer to is.

The best products I know are invisible. An Apple Watch that detects a heartbeat and calls for help. A tool that fits so naturally into someone's day they forget they're using it. That's the bar I actually care about. Pretty isn't enough. If someone notices they're using your product, it hasn't done its job yet. (I notice I'm using most apps about as much as I notice I'm wearing shoes with a rock in them. Which is to say: constantly, and with growing resentment.)

I take a lot of photos of stuff most people just walk past. Fog swallowing a road through sequoias. A library that looks like it's about to unfold itself onto the sidewalk. I'm not sure why my eyes default to working that way, but I can't turn it off.

I've lived in Chicago, Milwaukee, LA, New York, and now Seattle. Each city left something behind, mostly strong opinions about public transit that nobody asked for. I collect things that make people lean in for a second look, and I lose sleep over problems that were never actually part of the assignment. Design superpower or boundary-setting problem, depending who you ask. Probably both.

When I'm in my 60s, I want a barn full of animals, surrounded by tall trees, reading every day. Until then, I'll be the one asking why the button needs to move at all.