Designing for the moment machines start making decisions
I'm a product and service designer, researcher, force multiplier, and collaborator. I've been designing for digital products since 2010, across healthcare, financial services, e-commerce, non-profit, marketing automation, and human capital management -- mostly enterprise, mostly complex, always interesting.
Today I lead a small team of designers at Kiavi, a hard money lender helping to revitalize thousands of aged homes across the United States. We make complex things efficient and satisfying to use, which is an interesting challenge in an equally challenging industry. My recent focus has been on AI-augmented lending tools -- the kind of products where a bad interaction isn't just frustrating, it's a compliance risk or a delayed closing.
I led the AI adoption initiative across our design and product organization, building the training, the prototyping workflow, and the strategic framework for how design operates when the interface starts thinking for itself. That work shaped the products I designed -- embedding principles like decision versioning, human-in-the-loop review, and auditable AI directly into our product requirements. I love to observe and listen, to question and hypothesize, to learn, and to iterate.
In the future I'd like to see a world seamlessly integrating technology, privacy, and nature. But NOT Skynet. Far out, right? Maybe, but maybe not.
Life these days
I live in Michigan in a 1950's ranch house with my wonderful wife. We're both fortunate to work from home, which makes it easier to keep finding new projects to work on together -- right now we're renovating the house and cultivating our back yard into a place we can grow food and flowers and watch our animals run around. Our rascally dog Carlos and our cats Pistachio and Larry complete the picture.
I'm a music and technology obsessive, a living room DJ, a motorsports enthusiast, a knowledge curator, and a relentlessly curious human. I enjoy back country camping, feeling the warmth of the sun on the California coast, and searching for music I haven't heard yet. And of course, Porsches.
Talk to me about UX, art, music, design, architecture, record collecting, hiking, sustainable living, cooking and dining, all things Porsche, video games, cybersecurity, home networking, open source intelligence, aerospace -- or even cryptozoology. And probably a lot of other stuff too.
What I believe
Trust is designed, not declared. Users don't trust AI because you tell them to. They trust it because they can see what it did, why, and how to fix it when it's wrong.
Automation should augment judgment, not replace it. The best AI tools make experts faster. The worst ones make everyone equally mediocre.
Accessibility isn't a feature. It's the baseline. Every token, component, and interaction in my work meets WCAG 2.1 AA -- not because it's required, but because design that excludes people isn't design.