About
I am an interaction design graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, and will be graduating this May. That means I’m looking for a job! View my portfolio and résumé.
My thesis work includes a paper on the nature of design thinking and a project that explores the use of meta information in the physical world to support identity construction. At CMU, I currently teach Basic Interaction, a foundation interaction design course for HCI students. Last fall I taught a Design Computing course.
Before graduate school, I was a reporter, editor, web producer, web developer, and soccer coach. I have my own business, Yum Yum Web. But I do not attend to it much because of grad school.
I have a BA in English Writing with a concentration in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh.
On Blogging
Social scientist and notable Carnegie Mellon professor Herbert Simon said, “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” Blogs provide a platform for individuals to express courses of action to change the current state. And I believe passion compels them to do this.
The passion I write most frequently about is design. As an interaction design student at Carnegie Mellon, I view my goal as a designer to make the world a better place for humankind. My blog is an extension of that philosophy. By sharing my thoughts and experiences, I hope to engage and inspire others regarding the definition, value, and power of design.
If better design does have the power to make the world a better place, and if through blogging I become a better designer or help someone else become a better designer, and if others who blog similarly inspire others or improve themselves, then, as Simon suggests, perhaps all bloggers are designers, and through the act of blogging, individually and collectively, bloggers contribute to the design of a preferred world. Toward this end, I blog.
