I don't remember the first time I noticed design, but I remember trusting it.

As a child, I regularly traveled between the United States and Honduras, so airports became familiar long before I understood the systems that made them work. I couldn't have explained wayfinding or information architecture, but I understood their effects instinctively: a pictogram could tell me where to stand, a color could signal caution, and an arrow could guide thousands of strangers, speaking different languages, toward the same destination without a conversation.

Design was already helping people move through the world before I had the language to describe it.

Years later, another kind of navigable environment appeared in my life: the early web. In the mid-to-late 1990s, before search became nearly invisible, finding something online often required wandering through directories, following links across personal websites, and entering communities whose edges were difficult to define. Yahoo, AltaVista, HotWired, forums, and independent pages made the web feel less like a library and more like a territory.

I taught myself HTML and CSS because I wanted to participate in that territory, and I didn't just want to consume what other people had made; I wanted to contribute something of my own—something another person might encounter while following an unexpected path.

The web also expanded the boundaries of the world immediately around me because it gave me access to designers, musicians, artists, and communities whose work had little presence where I grew up in the Antelope Valley. I followed the Designers Republic and participated in its online community, and I sought out electronic music, experimental typography, unusual animation, installation art, and cultural work that asked more from its audience than immediate recognition.

What attracted me wasn't obscurity for its own sake, but the discovery that human creativity could take forms I had never been shown. Design could be practical and poetic, and it could communicate clearly while remaining provocative, playful, or strange. It could help someone find a gate at an airport, but it could also challenge someone to reconsider what they were looking at.

In high school, with encouragement from my family, I subscribed to Wired, The Futurist, and, for a time, The Wall Street Journal during the dot-com boom. I was fascinated by artificial intelligence, biotechnology, accelerating computing power, and speculation about how emerging technologies might reshape society, and rather than studying the future as a detached observer, I wanted to be part of it.

That fascination has never left me, and I genuinely love technology: computers, interfaces, games, controllers, gadgets, tools, and the physical details through which people interact with them. I don't see that enthusiasm as being in conflict with human-centered design because the two reinforce each other, and the more deeply technology becomes embedded in everyday life, the more consequential the relationship between a system and the person using it becomes.

I later studied multimedia and web design alongside foundational design, art history, and contemporary art, and installation work remained especially compelling to me because it treated the audience as a participant rather than a passive viewer. The work didn't exist solely as an object; it created a condition someone entered, moved through, and interpreted.

That distinction—between presenting something and creating the conditions for participation—has remained central to my practice.

An idea waiting for its medium

The interactive artwork on the homepage of my portfolio began years before I could build it properly.

Its earliest form was a grid of pill-shaped elements placed over a high-contrast photograph of a mountain, and I was attracted to the tension between the orderly graphic field and the irregular physical landscape underneath it. The image was visually striking, but visual impact alone wasn't enough.

I've never been comfortable adding motion, complexity, or spectacle simply to make a page appear more impressive. Those techniques can attract attention, and sometimes that's their job. But when a visual device occupies the central position on a homepage, I believe it should earn that attention by communicating something meaningful.

For several years, the idea remained unresolved, and although I explored versions of it and attempted to develop it with outside help, the result never quite matched what I could see in my mind. Eventually, I moved on from that version of the portfolio, but the concept remained.

The emergence of tools such as Framer and code-generating language models changed what was possible. For the first time, I could work through the interaction directly: test a behavior, observe the result, describe what wasn't working, revise the logic, and continue until the piece began to feel right.

AI didn't originate the idea. It allowed me to remain close enough to the making of it to see the idea through.

That distinction is important because the piece wasn't conceived as a demonstration of artificial intelligence; AI was the material that finally allowed a much older idea to take form.

The human and the field

The finished composition begins with a blurred human profile that resists immediate categorization by gender, ethnicity, or individual identity. The eyes are closed and the expression is composed and inward, and because identifying details have been softened, the portrait becomes less about a particular person and more about human presence itself.

The figure is also an AI-generated image. That creates a recursive relationship within the work: a human-made system has generated the image representing humanity, while a human designer has placed that image inside another human-made system.

Across the portrait sits an ordered field of white nodes, and some illuminate in bright blue, red, green, and yellow while connections briefly form between neighboring points, document a moment of activity, and disappear. Patterns grow, thin out, and begin again, but the portrait remains still while the network continually changes.

The behavior is based on Conway’s Game of Life, a cellular automaton in which a few local rules produce complex and unpredictable patterns. Each node lives, dies, or is born in response to the nodes surrounding it. When activity becomes sparse, new points are introduced. When a visitor hovers over, taps, or clicks a node, that interaction creates a new origin from which activity can spread.

The visitor can affect the system but can't command its outcome.

That's part of what makes the interaction feel alive because it isn't a predetermined animation that repeats identically for everyone, but is autonomous and responsive at the same time, so the visitor enters the system, changes it, and becomes part of what happens next.

I consider anyone who enters a page a participant because even apparent observation is an action: someone chose to arrive, to look, to move, or to stay. In this piece, that participation becomes visible, and the interface reflects the visitor’s presence back to them.

Networks, thought, and emergence

The network can be interpreted in several ways.

It resembles the hidden activity that begins when someone enters a website because a page request can initiate caching, analytics, data transfer, and communication between systems that the visitor never sees, so one arrival can produce a chain of activity across a much larger network.

It can also resemble cognition, as one thought activates another, an image recalls a memory, and a memory forms an association, so ideas spread, fade, reappear, and connect in ways that are only partly deliberate.

And at its most basic, the Game of Life evokes growth, proximity, reproduction, decline, and renewal. It's entirely constructed—mathematical rules written by human beings—yet its behavior can feel organic.

We often describe technology as though it were separate from nature, but I don't experience it that way because humans created the network and humans are part of nature. Language, cities, institutions, software, and artificial intelligence are all products of the same species that builds communities, invents tools, and tells stories.

Technology isn't the opposite of humanity. It's one of humanity’s expressions.

That belief is partly why the piece feels hopeful rather than dystopian, and the colors are bright and playful because that's part of my own visual language. I tend to use contrast—dark, restrained foundations interrupted by vivid color—to create energy and invitation, and although the network could easily have been rendered as cold, ominous, or clinical, I wanted it to feel approachable: serious, but not severe.

The role of play

Play isn't incidental to the interaction.

One of the earliest designed objects many people encounter is a toy, and before we understand interfaces or instruction manuals, we learn through touch, repetition, curiosity, and response. A toy invites participation before comprehension, so understanding develops through the act of using it.

That principle remains valuable in interaction design because a responsive surface acknowledges that a person is present, and a rollover state, a change of color, or a shift in behavior reflects the user’s action back to them, so the interface becomes a kind of mirror for intention.

The homepage uses that basic relationship to create a small moment of surprise because the visitor discovers that the field responds, their movement produces a visible consequence, and they are invited to experiment without being given an instruction.

Playfulness, however, doesn't exempt the work from meaning because novelty fades quickly when it's disconnected from purpose, and I wanted the interaction to offer delight while remaining anchored in an idea: people enter systems, influence them, and form relationships through them.

Looking beyond the obvious

While developing the piece, I began researching the use of dot fields in art and graphic design. John Baldessari’s work became especially important.

Baldessari often placed colored dots over people’s faces, and because the face—and particularly the eyes—normally attracts our attention first, obscuring it forces the viewer to look elsewhere. Clothing, posture, objects, setting, and composition become more visible, while the device interrupts an automatic reading and redirects attention toward details the viewer might otherwise ignore.

That mechanism resonated with the way I approach design.

A project often arrives as a visible request—a homepage, campaign, interface, service, or visual system—and research may identify tasks, friction points, and user needs. All of that is necessary, but the most important problem isn't always located on the surface.

I try to look through the visible system toward the person who must live with its consequences.

What relationship does the system create? Does it make someone feel capable or uncertain? Does it establish trust or suspicion? Does it welcome participation, or unintentionally exclude? Does it recognize the human being on the other side, or treat them as an abstraction?

On the homepage, the moving network attracts attention first, but the human remains behind it, visible but softened, so to see the person, the viewer must look through the system.

That's not only the visual idea behind the piece; it's the through-line of my work.

From artifact to consequence

The clearest examples of that through-line appear in projects where communication has meaningful consequences.

For the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at the University of Pittsburgh, the work involved making complex scientific information more legible and approachable to the people who needed to navigate it. The challenge wasn't to simplify science until it became superficial, but to create a clearer relationship between institutions, investigators, healthcare professionals, and the communities that research ultimately exists to serve.

For the All of Us Research Program, I helped establish and evolve a visual and communication language across a wide range of touchpoints, including digital experiences, paid media, out-of-home work, email, landing pages, and related program communications.

The project mattered to me because the stakes extended beyond the campaign itself, and the program was asking people to understand and participate in a major long-term research effort. If the communication felt impersonal, confusing, or disconnected from the people it hoped to reach, potential participants could miss an opportunity to contribute to medical research intended to represent a much broader population.

My concern wasn't simply whether the work looked distinctive, but whether the design could help the program meet people with enough clarity, warmth, and relevance to be understood.

That's the difference between an artifact and an outcome.

Websites are replaced, campaigns end, and interfaces are redesigned, so I'm not particularly sentimental about preserving a design merely because I worked hard on it. The value of the work isn't that it remains untouched, but what it enables while it exists.

A design may help someone understand, trust, enroll, participate, or make a decision. The pixels eventually disappear. The consequence may continue.

Even in a comparatively contained project such as an out-of-box setup experience for Windows, the same responsibility applies. The interface must respect the brand and feel visually resolved, but it also has to work for a wide range of people—including someone who may be uncertain, inexperienced, or encountering the system for the first time.

Coolness isn't the goal. Elegance is what happens when aesthetics, communication, accessibility, and usefulness converge.

Art and overture

I think of the homepage piece as both an artwork and an overture.

As art, it doesn't resolve into one prescribed interpretation because the network can represent digital infrastructure, thought, social systems, web crawlers, emergence, or life itself. Some of those meanings were consciously embedded, while others became clearer through making, observation, and conversation.

That openness isn't a failure of communication. It's an invitation for the viewer to participate in meaning.

As an overture, the piece introduces ideas that recur throughout the portfolio: systems and people, participation and agency, rigor and play, technological possibility, communication, and the responsibility to keep the human visible inside complexity.

The projects that follow do not share the same visual style, but they begin from the same ethic.

Design is problem-solving and communication, but it's also a form of care, expressed through decisions about what to clarify, what to foreground, what to simplify, and what not to overlook.

I didn't arrive at that belief late in my career. It's always been present—from trusting airport signs before I knew the word “wayfinding,” to contributing to the early web, to exploring the cultural possibilities of technology, to designing systems and communications used by people whose experiences may be very different from my own.

The homepage simply gives that instinct a visible form.

The network moves. The human remains.

The visitor enters, leaves an influence, and continues onward, and the work succeeds not when every layer is consciously decoded, but when the interaction communicates before explanation: something playful and serious, technological and human, structured and alive.

And perhaps, after looking through the network, someone becomes curious about the person and the practice behind it—not because they were told what to think, but because the work gave them enough reason to keep looking.