I architect how systems behave—especially the ones that shape public life.

I'm an interaction architect 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.

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 as designers and software engineers to reflect how our decisions within the architecture of interfaces create side effects that societies have to 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 have a longstanding obsession with Pesäpallo, Finnish baseball. It's complicated.