About
Design, and enough building to test it.
Spatial and immersive product designer, and enough of a builder to test my own ideas in a headset rather than argue about them in a deck. MS in Extended Reality with a concentration in Human-Computer Interaction, and a BFA in Game Design — both from Northeastern University.
I treat comfort as an accessibility problem, not a polish pass. In spatial work that means locomotion, session length, play space and the person who has never worn a headset before are design questions from the first sketch.
How I actually work
Five phases, run end to end on two graduate projects in Design for Dignity, with a graded deliverable at each one. I show this sequence only on projects that genuinely went through it — a process diagram on a project that skipped ideation is a lie with a nice icon.
- Research
- Definition
- Ideation
- Synthesis
- Delivery
What I mean by dignity
From graduate coursework in Design for Dignity: a design either honours four things about a person or erodes them. Merit — is this someone of inherent worth, or a funnel stage? Autonomy — can they choose, refuse, exit, and control how they are represented? Human rights — what are they entitled to regardless of whether they are a valuable user? Interpersonal connection — does this strengthen a relationship between people, or stand in for one?
I would rather show it than claim it. In Inhabiting Memory, every interpretive room came from that person's own interview rather than my reading of them, and I ruled out the most obvious mechanic available — letting a visitor handle a deceased relative as an object — because it treats a person as a prop. Those are the pillars working as build constraints, which is the only form in which they mean anything.
Instrumented evaluation
Graduate coursework in Biometrics of Design put me on eye tracking and heart-rate instrumentation — measuring where attention actually went and what the body did, rather than asking someone to recall it afterwards. It is the least common thing on this site and the one I would most like to use again: self-report tells you what a person believes about an experience, and instrumentation tells you what happened to them.
Where the rest of it comes from
Game interface design — diegetic UI, iconography, and taking a sketch through to a tested prototype. Interaction and experience foundations — object surveys, heuristic critique, and low-fidelity to high-fidelity wireframes. XR history and theory, which is where the argument that spatial media behaves differently from a screen actually comes from. And psychology, which is what any claim about attention, memory or cognitive load has to rest on.