Notes & thinking
Occasional writing on design systems, service design, facilitation, and the agentic workflows that run this practice.
I have been a tech worker for most of my working life. I started intuiting early that designing systems to free us from grudge work would reclaim time for the parts I actually love — collaborative workshops, sitting with the people on the end of the experiences I was hired to design, learning what impact my judgment calls had on their one precious mortal life. I got into design systems out of a deep love of colleagues and the people who would use what I made. I love humanity and I love tools. An
Config is coming again I think it was Config 2024 when I first had the feeling “Oh shit. Stuff is going to move faster than people can learn it”. I organized the first few Figma user group meetups in Atlanta back in 2018. During the first meetup we didn’t even have color swatches in Figma, but multi-player was clearly the future of design. Moving off of platform-locked tools (I still miss Sketch) and empowering collaboration on one design platform was exciting. Figma had incredible flexibility
Tiny throat. Giant mouth. I haven't actually read recently whether the Buddhist story talks about giant mouths and tiny throats or what, but I have changed my hungry ghosts to be about consumption for its own sake not even tied to hunger. I think it's a kind of hungry ghosts Buddhist imagery didn't quite describe. Who could imagine a whole collective body so divorced from its own hunger that what motivates it to consume, despite its inability to be nourished, is the fear of not consuming? The f
This post is meant as an adjunct to a talk I did July 18, 2024 with Ladies that UX in Atlanta. The talk was an introduction to somatic practices and an invitation into somatics as a tool in our design practice, particularly in the cultivating of self-care, belonging, human-centered design, and making for systemic complexity. In the research for this talk and in my years as a somatics practitioner and UX designer I've come across more resources than would ever make sense for a single workshop.