About

The story explains why one person does all this. This page is the record: where, when, and what.

Education

B.S. Cognitive Science with a specialization in Human-Computer Interaction, University of California San Diego. Graduated with honors.

UCSD’s was the world’s first cognitive science department, home to the connectionist school that seeded today’s neural networks and to Don Norman’s human-centered design tradition. The degree is the seam, formalized: how minds and engineered systems meet.

Where I’ve worked

Independent practice and family care (2021–present), concurrent throughout — Client projects: a structural RV rebuild, an RV Victron solar and electrical installation, and a studio build-out and large-scale mural collaboration for a professional artist. Since 2024, In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS) provider for a parent who needs full-time care, alongside the property work that came with it: a 35-foot gas line replacement that passed inspection, and a year-long, ten-item remediation that saved a threatened homeowner’s policy. Core volunteer at San Diego CoLab since 2024, building out a community makerspace and prototyping a tools-and-materials sharing site for the shop. Most recently I drew the architectural permit set for a porch, adapting years of dimensioned drafting to the conventions the discipline requires; the city building inspector pre-checked the set and had no corrections.

Design consulting (2015–2021) — Full-scope research, design, and direction for clients including Micron, Greenlee Communications, Capital One, and Chuck E. Cheese, plus medical-device work for Modular Medical, PeakLogic, and Flometrics. From 2016, Sigma Connectivity, alongside its principal, with whom I’d worked for three years at Room 5.

Room 5 (2012–2015) — User experience manager. Established the company’s design practice with the CEO; hired, mentored, and led the team; wrote winning proposals; led design on projects for DARPA, L3 Technologies, Micron, and InVue, plus seventeen more — from augmented retail to laundromats, barbecues to sprinklers.

Craftlab (2011–2012) — User experience designer. Web, mobile, and consumer devices, including GreatCall’s first-smartphone Android overlay and 5Star geofencing service.

Kyocera Communications (2008–2011) — Senior human factors engineer and carrier UI specification team lead, managing spec authors across the U.S., Russia, and India; advanced technology researcher creating concepts with Japanese design teams; UX embed with systems engineering.

Before and alongside (1994–2013) — Independent IT consulting: an average of twenty retained clients, some for more than fifteen years, run full-time through university. Earlier still: systems administration at Merrill Lynch, production welding and assembly on the truck-body line at Morgan Corporation, operating a soil-remediation system at ECOS, and a high-voltage field internship at Southern California Edison. The trunks are real jobs, not metaphors.

How I work

Principles

• Good design optimizes business performance and human potential.
• Everyone is doing design; teach them to do it well.
• Understand how all the layers work together to get the final experience right.
• I build things that respect the people who use them — and I won’t build dark patterns.
• I become fluent in whatever disciplines a problem needs.
• I learn just enough of every discipline involved to find where the work gets moving again.
• The hands keep the head honest — I trust prototypes over arguments.
• My favorite tool is whatever gives the most leverage on the problem — a lathe, a spreadsheet, an LLM, a whiteboard, or a conversation.

In practice it’s lean and iterative: start from research and findings, pair design with engineering to move in the right direction, then demo and run a retrospective to learn and adjust, always looking a sprint ahead.

The work itself spans the whole arc: problem definition, proposals, and scoping; user research, interaction design, and information architecture; fabrication, prototyping, and usability testing; documentation and QA; plus the hiring and mentoring that keep a team pointed the right way.

AI is the newest tool in the shop. I’ve worked with large language models since their public debut, and I direct them the way I’d direct any capable collaborator: clear intent, tight feedback, verified output.

This site is built the way I build things: like a good spec. Plain pages, fast loads, a sketch where a sketch will do. Clean and usable is the aesthetic.

Beyond the desk

Participant on winning hackathon teams at IoT World and Fashion Tech LA. Build-out and equipment setup for a community makerspace. On-site facilitation at a COVID vaccination superstation. Conference and trade-show volunteering around electric vehicles and STEAM education.

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