Designing Discernment is where to hear my voice outside the day job.

• October 5, 2026

  Designing Discernment

  The perfect mentor doesn’t exist, and neither does feeling ready

  On a lunch that ended in a flat no, a whiteboard that ended in a maybe, eleven likes I ignored for two comments, and why I’m finally writing in public.

  Read the essay ↗

• September 2026

  UXPALOOZA Conference

  Stable Skills in an Unstable World: What Endures When Design Work Keeps Changing

  A talk on the human skills that become more valuable as AI gets better at producing: calibrating fidelity, making sense of evidence, taking a position, and adapting ideas for the audience.

  Check out the deck ↗ Attend next year ↗
• June 2026

  Rosenfeld Media’s Designing with AI Conference

  Leading Through Ambiguity: Supporting a Design Team Relearning Their Craft

  How my team navigated AI-driven shifts in our own design practice. Playback is behind Rosenfeld’s paywall.

  Watch the session ↗ Attend next year ↗
• October 2020

  IBM Design Career Pathways

  Panelist Speaker

  A conversation on building a design career at IBM and navigating the path to Senior Designer. The other panelists and I would continue conversations by starting the Strategic Foresight guild, a meet up for those interested in learning speculative design frameworks.

  Discover Design at IBM ↗

• Visionscaping

  Ideas shouldn’t require an expensive, slow process to be felt and understood. Together we craft a detailed, imaginative picture of a future where a product fully meets people’s needs: how they feel, the environment it lives in, and the impact it has on their lives.

  Preview method +

• Relationship arcs

  Not every interaction will be delightful, but it can be productive. Experience maps that predict the sunrise and sunset of how people interact with a service, connecting the emotional journey with the behavioral loops technology measures. Rooted in HCI methodology.

  Preview method +

• Experience Frame

  A mentor’s framework that combines journey mapping with iteration planning, so teams stay relevant while learning fast and pivoting when needed. I have developed it further across dozens of contexts.

  Preview method +

• Research programs

  Participant pipelines built across my last three roles, from small cohorts with frequent contact to pre-screened panels willing to take part. At WHOOP, a 921-member paid panel cut research from weeks to days.

  Preview method +

I believe in design that respects both emotion and execution.

• Design with confidence

  As designers, we have an ethical responsibility to do our homework on the people we’re serving. While we can speak to our expert craft and design decisions, we must also recognize that user needs and challenges differ across every project. We can’t rely on our own worldview to accurately determine what to design and how it should work for those with different backgrounds. Through the habitual practice of conducting and elevating user research, transitioning from opinion-based to evidence-based design is one of the most liberating things we’ll do for ourselves as designers.

• Design for emotion

  The best experiences with products or services consider not only quantifiable measures that move the business forward like ROI and DAU, but also establish a positive relationship between humans and technologies. Not every interaction will be a delightful one, but when we approach problems with empathy and humility, we foster satisfactory engagements that bolster the future of technology as an augmentation of our human experience. We can bring frameworks for purposefully designing relationship arcs between humans and technology to guide teams toward promoting ethical futures through the use of our technology.

• Design with others

  The hardest problems we tackle are too complex and multifaceted to be meaningfully solved alone. Bringing together diverse teams of individuals from a wide range of backgrounds primes us to generate value that serves the masses. Through design thinking and human-centered methods, we can lead workshops and facilitate activities that help teams navigate uncertainty with a growth mindset, turn constraints into creative leverage, and amplify perspectives that might otherwise go unheard.

• Design for futures

  It’s deceptively easy to get trapped in our annual roadmaps and never-ending backlogs in ways that obstruct our ability to adapt to new information. Speculative design methods create space to pause, question, and reframe the long-term value of the ideas driving us today. By grounding our decisions in the real-world context of the people we’re designing for and understanding what truly motivates them, we can move beyond industry playbooks, imagine bolder futures, and choose the paths that are actually worth building.