home > who > interests
My interests are concentrated in three main disciplines:
Service design: |
how to create better service across a product/service's entire life cycle |
Strategy: |
how to plan and execute a product or service, and in particular how to understand its user audience. |
User experience design: |
how to create a usable and beautiful products and services |
My professional and personal interests tend to overlap, but here's a brief list of what I'm interested in lately.
Professional Interests
I'm interested in learning all there is to know about the work I do. My current interests include - but are not limited to - the following topics (in no particular order):
business: |
- Best practices: standards in all disciplines, especially managing the product development life cycle
- Sustainability and Systems Thinking: using holistic systems thinking/systems theory to design solutions and indicate change management
- User experience: benefits of user experience design and measuring those benefits both qualitatively and quantitatively (KPIs, metrics and ROI), promoting UX as a growing discipline; customer acquisition, retention and satisfaction; online communities and communication
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| design: |
- Infovis: information visualization and how information design affects perception of messages and branding
- Innovation: how to encourage and sustain it
- Interdisciplinarity: linkages between disciplines and encouraging cross-disciplinary collaboration
- Product design and sustainability: how social design helps address and solve global issues
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| technology: |
- Social media software: how to leverage technologies in the service of others, especially web 2.0 technologies (social media and online communities)
- Tools: how to create tools, and measure their effectiveness; collaborative technology/groupware
- Ubicomp: ubiquitous computing and how to design for it
- Web Standards: Standards based design, and Mac OSX development and applications
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I'm also very much interested in cultural aspects of these topics - including topics like memes, online culture, community building, how technology influences people and vice versa. All of these topics influence what I design and how I design it - and, of course, at the intersection of these areas (business, design and technology) is user experience.
I also administer a number of groups online. All links open in a new window.
You can view more of my social networks on my 'connections' page.
Personal Interests
When not found creating user experience design products, you can find me interested in the following:
- general: monitoring the latest trends and issues in pop culture, design, technology (especially social networking software and
Digital Lifestyle Aggregators) and politics (and how these all intersect)
- creative: art, crafts
, gardening, origami, painting
- travel: many places, including Burning Man

...and a multitude of other intellectual pursuits. If there's a free newspaper in the doorway of the store, I'll pick it up; if there's a way to satiate my intellectual curiosity, I'll find it. My motto in all that I do can be summarized by this: