Design
as Inquiry
Design, for me, is not problem-solving or deliverables.
It’s a method of investigation where the outcome is sense-making.
I treat both tangible and intangible interfaces as mental architectures, designing for how people think, not just how they click.
In that sense, the interface becomes an epistemology. I design thinking environments, not apps, not screens, where cognition, culture, and space meet.
I don’t study users in isolation; I map where meaning slips, not where usability breaks.
That’s a shift from human-centered to co-intelligent design.
I treat friction, slowness, and unfinishedness as design materials, moving design from usability to intentionality.
Across projects, whether reimagining a financial branch, a contact center, a clinical visit, or a digital space, I’ve learned that we’re never just changing layouts or adding technology.
We’re redesigning how trust happens in space: how people pause, where they turn, when they look for a human face, even in digital environments.
These projects became inquiries into choreography: the rhythm between digital flow and embodied presence.
Over time, my practice and research in spatial syntax proved what experience had already taught me:
that orientation, not efficiency, is what makes systems humane.
When design becomes orientation,
you produce fertile systems, not efficient products.
How I Came to This Way of Thinking
I began in computer science and information college, where clarity was defined by logic. But I was drawn to what couldn’t be computed, the way people relate to technology, place, and each other. That curiosity, led me to Human–Computer Interaction at DePaul University, where I learned to treat design as research: a way of seeing how cognition and culture meet.
Over the next decade, I worked across financial and consulting sectors from designing service systems and digital transformations to leading innovation teams. Each project revealed the same pattern: systems break not because of technology, but because meaning gets lost between policy, interface, and place.
This arc, from logic to lived systems, now helps me guide organisations through complex transformations. Whether the challenge is cultural adoption, digital integration, or public trust, my work translates systemic insight into orientation.
That insight pushed me to explore experience design beyond the screen and toward spatial analysis, space syntax, and futures thinking. I wanted to understand how environments themselves choreograph behaviour, trust, and belonging.
My practice now sits at that intersection: where experience becomes orientation, and where systems thinking meets human experience.
Principles of Practice
My design research is anchored in four movements:
Orientation
Finding bearings in complex systems before making interventions.
MEaning
Connecting policy, culture, and experience so intent translates across scales.
Constraint
Using limits as a form of intelligence, not friction.
Rhythm
Designing for coherence across time, not just touchpoints.
How I Think Through Design
Situated Systems Thinking
Studying design within its spatial, historical, and cultural conditions.
Multi-modal Ethnography
Studying design within its spatial, historical, and cultural conditions.
Spatial Cognition & Space Syntax
Mapping how form and movement shape co-presence.
Pluriversal Research Ethics
Designing processes that honour multiplicity and local nuance.
Research As Practice
I don’t separate design and research one teaches the other how to think.
Research, for me, is how design learns to care.
It’s how I bring systems toward clarity, empathy, and cultural intelligence.
I design not for automation, but for what remains human:
judgment, interpretation, and shared sense-making.
I practice what I call epistemic care making space for doubt, dissent, and plurality inside the systems we build.
I ask not only what works, but what is erased, what becomes legible, and what is allowed to speak.
Design, at its best, is a negotiation between interfaces, bodies, and meaning.
Research Ethos
Thinking ...
Thinking ...
My thinking translates into two kinds of work:
Speculative inquiries that explore what worlds could emerge → Imagination
Applied systems design that brings clarity to complex experiences → Practice