About

Design

As a researcher, I am a problem-finder and a problem-solver. In an attempt to create products and experiences which enhance the lives of the users, I employ holistic research practices with rapid, lo-fi, and hi-fi prototypes in Axure, Draw.io, Sketch, SketchUp, and Balsamiq. With every great design comes the research to back it up, which is why the use of usability tests, personas, case-studies, field-tests, card-sorts, and iterative designs lead the products I put out.

Living with type-1 Diabetes for most of my life has driven my interest in medical technology and User Experience research for people within the medical setting. From constant insulin-therapy to the experience of the hospital and technologies used between patient-and-nurse, many of my interests lie within improving these tools to create an easier, more affordable, and more intuitive management.

Along with medical technologies, however, I am driven by the emerging use of virtual reality (VR) technologies in games and research, and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in the realm of machine-learning and in automated self-driving vehicles (ASDVs). Particularly with ASDVs, I want to push the boundaries between human error and utilitarianism and understand what humans want out of the products in which they place their trust. With VR technologies, I am interested in the use of this tech to research the ways in which they can be used to develop tolerances to fears and to interact with worlds beyond our own.

Art

Disease is something everyone is familiar with on some level. I've lost vision due to complications with diabetes – it is my own fault. I take better care of myself now, but the damage done creates an intimate experience with the many aspects of cause and effect. Grey spots exist in a space between my brain and the real world, sometimes integrating with whatever I'm looking at. In my work, I let these damaged and muted perceptions of the environment find an association with the often extreme amounts of light, color, sound, and other information that contemporary visual culture likes to throw at us, creating moments in these paintings where the eye cannot find a line or shape - it appears blurry, areas upon which are impossible to focus.

Many contemporary artists practice in a way that relies on a call & response method – that is: they make a mark or series of marks, step back from the work, absorb it, and respond to that mark with another mark, all the while pulling the influences from the world around them and the history of art. I am no exception to this. While I don't believe my work is particularly politically motivated, I would say that there are strong undertones of visual culture and the extension thereof. Streaks of paint made to look like blurs of motion, overexposed photographs and x-rays, multiple layers of color, shape, and line are used to assign space and create a problematic viewing surface of each piece, where the illusion of space is either heightened or muted and a multidimensional surface allows the paint to sink into space when it actually protrudes from the surfaces.