About David Justh

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 20 years of experience:

Creating new relations in response to conflicts
Navigating constraints to prefigure — and then change — existing situations into preferred ones
And doing so through transdisciplinary interventions focused on shared understanding, desired outcomes, high-touch experiences, and downstream value

Throughout this time, I’ve worked in eclectic ways across diverse domains to pursue total quality management in SaaS products and socio-technical systems.

In the most basic sense, there's an innate pleasure in finding things out. This includes discovering things you aren't looking for.
I also care that this work synthesizes the love of learning with collaborative practices.
More importantly, research carries a sense of duty, as liberating knowledge is not only an enticing proposition, but a tremendous privilege. By extension, as much as tractable research may carry influence — if not power — it carries just as much humility, if not more.
From there, research, when done properly (debiased, replicable, inclusive, safe, relevant) affords a license to move from data ➔ information ➔ understanding ➔ knowledge ➔ intelligence.
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.
- 3 years of ethnographic research focused on the sociocultural aspects of several music communities in Brazil 🇧🇷
- 12 years of experience design & strategy at an R1 university, with service design and research as core inputs. During this period, I co-designed 5 enterprise systems and scaled numerous educational, financial, occupational, and mental health initiatives. At a high level, this was accomplished by:
  - Managing explicit, implicit, and tacit knowledge, while...
  - Balancing deliberate and emergent strategies, to...
  - Use research to unlock organizational intelligence, to...
  - Remain adaptive and relevant in shifting landscapes
- 6 years of UX research & design work spanning a half-dozen sectors
- Experimental research methods • co-design • IA • descriptive statistics
- Service design • customer experience (CX) • employee experience (EX)
- High-fidelity diagramming • mid-fidelity prototyping
- Organizational ergonomics • process optimization • matrixed team coordination • project management • change management • tacit knowledge management
- Applied ethics • design for safety • accessibility
  - "When you design for the margins, you get the middle for free" —Jutta Treviranus
When arriving at the nexus of insights and actions, and as informed by first principles in design and sensemaking processes, I strive to better understand the essential features of products and systems through:
- Information ecologies
- Thinking styles: e.g., values, emotions, personal rules
- Communication styles: linguistic, paralinguistic, prosodic, semiotic
- Contexts, framing effects, and the post-positivist paradigm more broadly (to make better sense of complex social phenomena)
- The limits of human information processing (a.k.a. cognitive ergonomics, where ergo = work and nomos = laws) to drive evidence-based design decisions:
  - e.g., signal detection, guided search, inattention, and interference surrounding:
    sensory perception, mobility, prior knowledge, memory, load, comprehension, and task performance
- And, ultimately, clarity and substance in bids for coherence, agency, and efficacy in amorphous spaces
- I also use these 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 easy for resources to succeed, but hard to fail.