Before presenting a finding, diagnose whether you're addressing a gap in knowledge (head), in motivation (heaert), or in knowing how to act (hand), because most readouts fail by answering the wrong one.

I spent a decade designing medical technology and then became a breast cancer patient inside the systems I'd been designing for. What that taught me about early detection access, patient-facing design, and the difference between what a study captures and what a patient experiences.

It’s pretty easy to design a seamless, high-tech vision for healthcare in 2040. The hard part is patiently advocating for incremental user experience improvements inside a multi-decade, technology-driven roadmap — and that skill doesn’t get attention in design education.

Design education teaches desirable, feasible, viable. Medical devices add a fourth constraint that reorders the other three — and most designers entering healthcare aren't prepared for how much it changes the work.

Healthcare products never have a single or simple user. The user who is operating, benefiting, interpreting the output, accountable, buying, and paying for the device are almost never the same people. How to run research that serves all six without collapsing into paralysis.

Clinicians, engineers, regulatory, and marketing describe the same problem in incompatible terms. How to build the one account of a problem all of them recognize as true — and how to be a ruthless enough editor of your own data to do it.

Fall 2020 - Undergraduate course on qualitative research methods for design.

Wintersession 2018 - Taught a five-week studio course, sponsored by IBM, on using qualitative research to design user-friendly products and systems. Student teams took on RISD systems that frustrate the campus community — course registration, on-campus housing selection — and proposed human-centered redesigns grounded in interviews with students, resident advisors, and Residence Life staff.

2017-2018 - Student facilitator of “Design Thinking” module for Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Small Business Curriculum, developed by Babson to support small businesses in Rhode Island.