About People First Design

People First Design is my design mantra. It is a signpost that reminds me that I care about design because I care about people, their needs, desires, and possible futures. In short, it is about four levels of my design philosophy:

• Designs should be usable. In order to be usable, technologies, tools, and products should be designed for accessible, transparent, and adpatable use. The technology should adapt to people, not the other way around.
• Designs should be useful. This means creating technologies that address real needs, issues, and opportunities for people. In order to be truly useful, design should start with an understanding of people, not with the technology.
• Designs should bring joy. There will always be trade-offs in design, and no design can solve all problems. However, all designs can be imbued with joy or splendor for the people that will use or be affected by them.
• Designs can enrich the world. Design is about creating possible futures for people. Such a great responsibility requires humanist, accessible, and sustainable approaches to design. Through these approaches, technology can enrich the world and address its most serious issues.

About Me

I recently received my Master's Degree from the HCI/d program at Indiana University, and I received my Bachelor's degree in Informatics with a focus on Journalism and Communications from the University of South Carolina Upstate. I am currently working as an interaction design intern at Disney Animation Studios in Burbank, California.

I am passionate about communicating and synthesizing multiple points of view, and I excel at knowing what questions to ask and how to get the answers. This translates well to interaction and experience design since they involve complex design spaces with varied stakeholders. I believe that good design is an ongoing process that doesn't end when the product ships. I am also interested in how businesses can incorporate design-thinking into their processes to create better products and better business practices, as well as the practical application of critical and design theory.

My life experience has put me in some glamorous and not-so-glamorous jobs. In the past 10 years I have been a design team leader, teacher, researcher, student, salesman, manager, consultant, co-editor of a newspaper, and a dishwasher. I have learned many lessons from all of these experiences and I see every situation as an opportunity to learn something new.