Thank you for visiting! First thing’s first: My last name tends to confuse folks because the pesky “h” throws them off. It happens to be silent. Just(h) pretend it isn’t there 😉

I study human interaction with the designed world and leverage diverse experiences working in eclectic, hands-on ways to help organizations make informed, sound decisions. Not only by understanding their customers and clients, but also their own teams.

Design — which exists in the gap between science and speculation — is navigating constraints to materially transform things amidst uncertainty. To this end, I enjoy interrogating nebulous problem spaces and the network effects of organizational paradigms to prefigure situations before enabling them into preferred ones. Since the most interesting aspects of work are often found at the edges of disciplines, expansive interests have led me to pursue participatory and transdisciplinary interventions focused on credible, tractable, and sustainable downstream value. Such interventions are typically accomplished through (for starters): defining the range of what’s possible, guided discovery, shared understanding, conscientious actions, meaningful order, and enhancements to organizational structures. Otherwise, waste/debt looms, product credibility and/or team morale erodes, and you invariably have to do things over again. And again.

• Translate between humans and complex adaptive systems

• Read situations to bring the unnoticed, latent, or abstract into the real

• To ask the right questions because there are no right answers to the wrong questions

• Distinguish signal from noise, to understand what people do, not what they claim to do

• Help teams have the conversations they’re avoiding having with themselves and/or each other

• Design relationships, processes, and less visible qualities across disciplines (e.g., communication, collaboration)

• Protect revenue and safety by developing credibility and alleviating risk in complex products and work systems

• Architect cognitive load and adaptive capacities across organizational systems so stakeholders don’t drown in noise

• Exercise judgment under constraints to drive critical business decisions and bring high-visibility projects across finish lines

• Smooth over tensions, generate internal commitment, reduce surprises, inspire action, and make calls when playbooks don’t fit

• Bridge leadership, engineering, and product to clear roadblocks, resist inertia, and develop trust through chains of defensible logic

• Configure organizational readiness, operational coherence, intelligent reform, and strategic integration in fluid, dynamic problem spaces

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

• 6 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 animate executives and scale high-touch, white glove services that fell into 4 broad buckets:

  • Financial

  • Educational

  • Occupational

  • Mental health

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

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

  • Government: United States Digital Response, UT Austin, Shield AI

  • AI: Shield AI, YouTube, Nuance, Bold Insight

  • Defense + aviation psychology: Shield AI

  • Finance: Capital One, Chime, UT Austin

  • Education: UT Austin, LEAH Project

  • E-commerce: Wayfair, Tripadvisor

  • Job Search & Hiring: Indeed

  • Social media: Bold Insight

  • Travel: Tripadvisor

To be asked “What’s your process?” is as unanswerable as “What’s your favorite method?” (The best methods are the ones fit for purpose and get the job done.) The Design Squiggle may be one of the more honest process representations out there. That said, many processes gathered in Hugh Dubberly’s compendium can be valid. Or not. 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 ➔ Own the work ➔ Guide functional decisions ➔ Align with leadership

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

➡️ “In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.” — Richard Hamming

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

➡️ “The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.” — Gregory Bateson

➡️ “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

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 mixtures of research paradigms to gain dynamic and critical understandings of:

• Sensemaking processes

• Conversational design principles

• Thinking styles (values, emotions, personal rules)

• Bodies, materials, places, practices, and precedents

• Information ecologies, contexts, and lived experiences

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

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

• Complex structures, systems phenomena, and their transition/transformation states (e.g., non-linearity, emergence, interdependence, ecotones, liminality)

• And, ultimately, clarity and substance in bids for coherence, antifragility, 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 things to succeed, but hard to fail.

In a nutshell, I focus on research to help solve some of the problems of the world while not devaluing the human to justify the machine.

In one basic sense, research is a relational, human 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? Probably headed in the wrong direction, as you risk frittering away 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 because:

• It’s always intrinsically preliminary

• It’s frequently dialectical

• Science understands its own fallibility (following Jacob Brownowski)

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 a turbulent, 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’re more worth doing.