Research

Minerals, Material & Post-Extractive Design

My doctoral research investigates how design decisions shape mineral systems, and how those systems, in turn, reshape the communities and ecologies around them. A decade of fieldwork in African mining communities and a PhD from Carnegie Mellon, developing post-extractive frameworks that center local knowledge and agency over extraction and profit. The work produced a set of artifacts: paradigms, principles, modalities, a manifesto, and field notes.

AI as a Design Material

A second ongoing line of inquiry treats AI as raw material and asks less what AI can do for design and more what design can do for AI, and turns that into tools for design research that shorten the distance between talking to people and knowing what they meant. The work runs alongside industry practice at Meta, and keeps returning to questions of ethics and equity that the field has been slow to ask.

Design Leadership & the Scalar Approach

This third line of inquiry arises from my academic-to-industry experience and focuses on design leadership as design acts. My claim is that leadership is an interactive system, and leading teams involves building resonant relationships. This process is a skill to be mastered through applied systems thinking. The last six years of research, through industry experience and interviews with design leaders, which materialized my working Scalar Approach; through that, I have developed my commitments and asks for the design teams I lead.