I live a life of curious intention, constantly looking for the next challenge but wide open to what that may look like. I spent seven years in philanthropy, but in three very different contexts. A community foundation in South Carolina, a global reproductive rights foundation in Nebraska, and an organization supporting grassroots climate activism in the Bay Area. I’ve worked with teams in dozens of countries across South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and North America. Working in a global setting has always been of major appeal to me. It provides the space to examine my assumptions about the world I live in and meet people with ideas I could never have thought of on my own. Cross pollination makes all our work better.
As time went on, I felt a gap emerge between the inspiring work I was part of and how it was getting shared. I was reading a lot of Word documents and PDFs. I’m not knocking, but is this the best form for presenting a health worker’s two-day trek between villages in the Himalayas? How do you capture the feeling of putting the final cap on a long day of building a biofuel strategy with partners in Indonesia in a word processor? Since day one, I have been compelled to make visuals and experiences to reflect the richness of the worlds I was seeing but lacked the depth of expertise. Time to go back to school.
Stanford Design gave me everything I could have hoped for in this pursuit. I’ve had countless late nights in the lab, learning with my body and my hands through working with wood, metal, glass, and electronics. I became fluent in a suite of digital tools such as Adobe CC, Figma, Miro, Claude and more to bring ideas to life (with nary a Word doc in sight). Perhaps most importantly, I deepened my ethnography and design research skills. I became a better listener, a better asker, and a better synthesizer. This practice is what produces the insights of meaning and consequence, acting as the guiding force for those aforementioned physical and digital skills.
In my time at the d.school, I authored an 80-page publication on field-wide design paradigm shifts. I built and deployed hand-turned wooden figurines with embedded AI agents that guide people through lost queer history in San Francisco. I researched AI’s impact on Tribal Nations and developed tools to strengthen governance and data sovereignty. I constructed an 8 x 8 foot dynamic mural to honor my ancestors whose lives were lost to the AIDS epidemic. These ideas had always lived deep within my heart and mind, and Stanford gave me the tools to share them with the world.
Perhaps as a consequence of my growth, my curiosities have run far past the initial questions that brought me to Stanford. My driving questions are now: how do we use design to push what’s possible, no matter the sector? How do we create not only good human-centered products and experiences, but durable humanity-centered systems that these creations are nested within?
