Professors take sabbaticals as breaks from their research work; so I thought it would be a good opportunity as a practitioner to take a break, and opt-in to the world of academia. Providing myself with space away from the hyper-speed of commercialization has allowed me to foster deeper musings on philosophy, psychology, and the future of human computer interactions.

I believe that design needs to be approached beyond just commercial production output; design is the creative process that captures humanity's hopes and dreams. I take my responsibility seriously as a designer and leader, to foster my own explorations on design philosophy through critical inquiry.

My thesis research was an exploration on how consumptive media companies promote the loss of user mental autonomy; and therefore to regain autonomy, we can leverage HCI interactions through prompting awareness toward user intention. A case-study will be available shortly to capture my research highlights.

I’m absolutely fascinated by psychology; specifically learning psychology, behavioral psychology, and cognitive sciences. This helps me investigate human experiences one layer deeper than just interactions: such as the limits of cognitive capacity, conditions required for neurochemical release responsible for motivation, and how individuals or users construct behavioural mental models of their environments.

My interests in psychology split into three categories:

First is self-motivated behavior, with a particular interest with Ryan Deci’s Self-Determination Theory (SDT) which outlines three basic human psychological needs: autonomy, competence and relatedness.

The second is how dopamine release schedule can be controlled to affect motivation in the context of user interactions.

And finally, socio psychology in the framework of organic community building and belonging – which you can see in my work building intimate design communities via the Makeshift Collective.

As an end-to-end designer that works with high level concepts to the execution and public release of software, I care deeply about the implications of what we create. It’s one thing to build a compelling commercial experience – it’s another thing to understand how that will create cultural and behavioral shifts through larger scales of time.

I have also become fascinated with the idea of user “states” within user experiences. A user is often classified by their behavioral or "user" profile, capturing a predictive model of their preferential behaviors. However profiles don’t account for the changes in everyday interactions that are affected by different temporary “states”, such as moods, circumstances, routines, or scenarios. How might we design user experiences that accommodate to multiple user “states” rather than profiles?

And finally, I care deeply about the user well-being and how to create experiences that don't overload or fatigue users. We are working with an attention economy – and engagement has to be created meaningfully over bombarding users with notifications.

I perceive design to be less of a vocation, more an approach to investigation that combines systems thinking with cultural investigation to produce interesting human experiences.

I care a lot about humans and their experiences – ever since I was young, I’d find myself imagining new ways for people to interact and would build new social groups, and new interactions online even with my personal acquaintances. I recently dug up an old drawing of a "digital chalkboard" concept I drew up in elementary school to reimagine how the classroom's chalkboard could increase accessibility and clarity to homework information. This value system isn’t something I learned – by living it, it radiates into everything that I do inside and outside of work.

My mission is to contribute to the cultural progression of our world through the interaction with technology, so that we can be healthier, happier, and increase well-being through community and the ability to self-author our own lives. I believe strongly that tech should help unlock human achievement, and not hinder it. Therefore there’s important ethics to always be considered behind everything that we create.

Many organizations seek designers when they have clear things to execute on; however, by definition this removes the process of creative exploration. I find this to be unfortunate – the skills of designers are more than ripe for contributing to innovation; but without a clear integration of autonomy and allowing innovation to trickle upward, talent becomes wasted.

I respond to this in two ways. First is to position myself as a strategic partner who can also tactically executes the mission. The value I create is in my working relationships – while the artifacts that I produce are just reflections of that. Second is to lead designers on my team in a way that allows them to celebrate autonomy, mastery, and relatedness; this allows them to have a clear sense of how to contribute to the organization’s mission.

My practice thrives on navigating unchartered territories and blank canvases with an open and enthusiastic mind; guiding my team and stakeholders through the journey of discovery and expanding possibilities for new interactions and new lines of business. I work strategically across teams; but also create highly effective systems for design teams to produce output that is not just celebrated by its users, but brings value to businesses beyond what they could have imagined themselves.

The following are a list of shifts in technology that I think will have a major impact on the future of humans and their interactions with tech. There’s definitely more, but the following are the ones I’m particularly excited about.‍

Applications of AI

AI Imaging – generative rapid prototyping is what I consider the first foray into collaborating with computer intelligence to produce creative works. Up until now, computers were merely tools that thrived on instruction or literal input; therefore the ability to support in the process of conceptualization can amplify the human creative ability to imagine, as creative directors over technical artists.‍

‍Meaningful Recommendations – I’m fascinated by machine learning models that allow meaningful sorting of mass content; breaking apart unique characteristics of content and meta data, overlaid with user-generated relational data (how user’s use the content) to provide meaningful experiential recommendations. Discovery is the most exciting characteristic of human exploration – and tech has amazing potential in pointing users to the right content at the right time.‍

Deeper Humanization

Experiential States (over User Profiles) – Humans are often oversimplified into user-models that predict universally consistent behavior. However, while "personalities" and "preferences" may remain generally consistent – moods and circumstances provide an additional layer. Humans change needs from moment to moment, to capture “mood profiles” over "user profiles" is already a step forward; the next journey is into "states" or "moments" that reflect the complexity of the human experiential condition.‍

‍Digital Well-Being – Recent concerns have been raised about the effects of consumptive media companies competing for our attention. And while technology itself is neither good nor bad, as humans we have a choice in determining if technological applications can contribute or take away from humanity.

‍Mass Customization – Leveraging fully digital intake workflows, robotics and 3d-printers during the manufacturing process allows for custom workflows that break from rigid operating procedures. This unlocks the ability to mass customize physical products. ‍

Social Computing

Communities & Web3 – projects in the Web3 space are still early but incredibly promising in creating meaningful online communities surrounding non-fungible digital artifacts. Non-fungibility paves an incredibly path forward to how we exchange digital goods; opening up new possibilities to create value overlaid with our existing physical world.

‍Augmented Reality & Mixed Reality – AR, MR, and VR are deeply visceral way of bridging the human and digital worlds to explore new mediums for human imagination. To seamlessly connect the digital and physical world lets us focus less on the question of “what’s real” and regroup on the question “what’s possible”.