Multi-disciplined. Rigorous. Flexible. 

How I'm Different

My background in cultural studies and information science separates me from the traditional UX professional. So many of us in UX come to the field from the social sciences (ex. anthropology, psychology) or the "hard sciences" (ex. computer science), but fewer from the humanities, like myself. In my experience, fluency in the arts and humanities is a great asset alongside traditional UX methods in understanding the human experience of user experience. My education in two interdisciplinary fields means I value working both within and across methods with the same level of rigor.

Of late, I have been interested in tailoring experiences which appeal to "cultures of consumption" in my work, that is, communities of users who make sense of themselves and their world through their relationships with goods, objects, or more generally "things" in the broadest sense. At a time in which the movement of people, goods, and ideas across national borders is more commonplace than ever, my aim is to understand the global language of brands; the cultural influencers that lead to design choices, the manners in which they are received or "read" by users, the stories that emerge from them, and the community identity that develops from their interaction. 

I'm an evangelist for interdisciplinarity. I believe it provides UX professionals the flexibility to transfer and transport their critical frameworks and vocabularies to present challenges and to future users, products, trends, and phenomena. To put it in the form of a question, what happens when we place the humanities at the center of UX? This is a topic I come back to again and again, and it only deepens my interest in user experience.