Helping teams and leaders repair systems, align strategy, and deliver with integrity
I'm an interaction engineer and service designer working at the edge of large-scale digital transformation, iterative service delivery, and tech deployment. Most recently, I was Head of Design at 18F, where I scaled one of the largest in-house human-centered design teams in the U.S. government. In 2024, I taught service design at the University of Michigan. I'm currently leading the Portland Digital Corps, a civic tech sprint experiment helping local nonprofits solve digital challenges. Last fall, I organized Design for the Public 24, a civic tech conference focused on tactics, practice, and improving how public interest technologists approach the mission. I also serve as Board President of AIGA Portland, where we organize Portland Design Month.
I work at the intersection of technology, institutions, and critical theory. My background spans public interest tech, civic design, policy delivery, and systems strategy. I’ve led multi-agency transformations, taught graduate students how to map service ecosystems, and built scrappy field projects with volunteers on shoestrings.
I’m currently developing a framework for Interaction Engineering—a systems-level design practice focused on making complex digital experiences legible, resilient, and durable. It sits between UX, service design, and infrastructure, and centers on how people actually experience systems over time.
These days, I think a lot about how software and AI systems are reshaping public life—often without much scrutiny. I’m interested in how we protect social context, institutional memory, and human dignity while still building things that work. Not everything needs to scale. Sometimes it just needs to be right.
Whether I’m advising an org on platform risk, coaching a design team, or helping policymakers unpack a vendor contract, I’m always asking: what are the second-order effects of this system, and who gets left behind?
Stuff I Think About
I study how interfaces and infrastructure become sites of hype, narrative control, and quiet coercion. My frameworks—like consequence design and interaction engineering—help designers and technologists reflect on how their decisions ripple through systems, creating side effects that societies must navigate over time.
I've spoken at global venues like IxDA Oslo, UX Australia, ConveyUX, and Rosenfeld Media’s Civic Design Conference. My work has appeared in A List Apart, Public Sector Network, and elsewhere.
Lately, I’ve been writing on the emergence of agent experience (AX)—not as an inevitability, but as a design terrain with profound implications. As LLMs and autonomous agents increasingly mediate human decisions, we need better ways to surface context, preserve agency, and prevent civic life from being reduced to API calls.
If you're reckoning with complexity, building for trust, or just trying to understand where everything's going—I probably have thoughts. Check the blog →
Also Me
Outside work, I coach high school tennis (Oregon 4A Girls State Coach of the Year, 2022) and apply similar systems thinking to sports performance and leadership development. I co-host the Future Perfect Book Club podcast, and sometimes DJ or anchor local radio news. In 2004, I invented Tennis Polo (Toccer)—a weird sport that somehow still exists.
I also founded Indianapolis Design Week and previously served as a Commissioner on the Portland Historic Landmarks Commission. I have a longstanding obsession with Pesäpallo, Finnish baseball. It's complicated.