• 3 years of ethnographic research focused on sociocultural aspects of several contemporary music scenes in Brazil 🇧🇷

• 12 years of strategy and management for 5 top-ranked graduate programs at UT Austin (R1). With applied research, information design, enabling management systems, and journey management as core inputs, I balanced deliberate and emergent strategies to galvanize executives and scale numerous initiatives that fell into 4 broad buckets:

  • Financial

  • Educational

  • Occupational

  • Mental health

• 6 years of user research & design work spanning diverse sectors:

  • Health: Nuance (Microsoft), GoodRx, National Alliance on Mental Illness, UT Austin

  • Defense + aviation psychology: Shield AI

  • Finance: Capital One, Chime, UT Austin

  • Education: UT Austin, LEAH Project

  • E-commerce: Wayfair, Tripadvisor

  • AI: Shield AI, Indeed, Nuance

  • Job Search & Hiring: Indeed

  • Travel: Tripadvisor

To be asked “What’s your process?” is as unanswerable question as “What’s your favorite method?” is. (The best methods are the ones fit for purpose.) The Design Squiggle might be the most honest process representation (e.g., non-linear, emergent). That said, many processes gathered in Hugh Dubberly’s compendium are also valid. Point is, responses vary by the particulars of context and scenario. That said, here’s a handful of things I bear in mind when engaging with problems and constraints:

• Listen ➔ Keep listening ➔ Never stop listening ➔ Open the junk drawer at some point

• Formulate penetrating questions ➔ Guide discovery ➔ Capture, disentangle, and translate data & context

• Derive meaning, framing, direction, and value ➔ Reduce ambiguity, myopia, friction, risk, and waste

• Cultivate relationships ➔ Convey critical insights and perspectives ➔ Gain allies ➔ Build consensus & trust

• Develop shared language and understanding ➔ Guide functional decisions ➔ Align with leadership

• Drive accountability ➔ Learn from mistakes ➔ Adapt to change ➔ Ongoing commitment ➔ Evolve

When arriving at the nexus of insights and actions — and when pursuing total quality management in socio-technical systems — I strive to better understand the essential features of products and people through:

• Sensemaking processes

• Mixtures of research paradigms for dynamic and critical understandings of:

  • Conversational design principles

  • Thinking styles (values, emotions, personal rules)

  • Information ecologies, contexts, and lived experiences

  • Framing effects and communication styles (linguistic, paralinguistic, prosodic, semiotic)

  • Complex structures, systems phenomena, and their transition/transformation states (e.g., ecotones and liminality)

• The limits of human capabilities and information processing (perceptual, cognitive, psychosocial):

  • e.g., signal detection, guided search, emotion, environment, mobility, inattention, interference, prior knowledge, memory, load, comprehension, and task performance

• And, ultimately, clarity and substance in bids for coherence, agency, and efficacy in amorphous spaces

• I use the above to manage complex relationships with situational awareness, all of which is to say: I enjoy applying the relational and analytical aspects of my personality, not only so it’s easier for resources to succeed, but hard to fail.

“The special function of scientific explanation is…to turn the unexpected, as far as possible, into the expected.” S.E. Toulmin

In a nutshell? To help solve some of the problems of the world while not devaluing the human to justify the machine.

In the most basic sense, research is a relational science. It’s also formalized curiosity, and I find innate pleasure in figuring things out. For instance, an effective interviewer sets up the conditions for good conversation and then gets out of the way. This involves asking the right questions to begin with, as there are no right answers to the wrong questions.

This work also entails making sense of messy variability and discovering things you aren't looking for even when they’re unpopular. Research isn’t vote counting.

At a higher altitude, if you’re building faster than you’re learning, then what are you doing? You may be headed in the wrong direction, as you likely risk and waste resources along the way.

Research also carries a sense of duty, as liberating knowledge is not only an enticing proposition, but a tremendous privilege. By extension, however, while tractable research may carry influence — if not power — it carries more humility.

From there, and when done properly (relevant, feasible, value for money, valid, pragmatic, transparent, inclusive, debiased, safe, replicable), quality insights afford a license to move from data ➔ information ➔ meaning ➔ understanding ➔ knowledge ➔ intelligence ➔ wisdom.

When balanced, these integrated qualities underpin design and business decisions in the long-term service of problems that run the gamut from ease of use improvements ➔ heightened efficiencies ➔ the reduction of adverse events ➔ innovation ➔ a more human tomorrow.

This is a tricky balance to strike in an increasingly complex world where change is constant and sustainable outcomes are a concern, as patterns of the past are unlikely to apply moving forward. (What got us here won’t get us there.) Fortunately, first principles in design stand the test of time.

And while evidence-based work isn’t always straightforward, difficult endeavors are attractive because they seem more worth doing. So does doing things as well as circumstances allow, in order to reduce the chances of having to do them over. Or, in the words of Russell Ackoff:

“All of our problems arise out of doing the wrong things righter. The more efficient you are at the doing the wrong thing, the wronger you become. It is much better to do the right thing wronger than the wrong thing righter! If you do the right thing wrong and correct it, you get better.” — Russell Ackoff