A fundamental desire in all humans, I believe, is to express ourselves. From constructing boats and buildings out of Lego blocks to scribbling in our notebooks, from strumming the strings on a guitar or tapping the keys on a piano, to dancing, cooking, programming, we are all creating something as self-expressions.

For me, one of the ways that I do this is through design.

The year was 1998, and for a high school project, I learned how to write something called Hyper Text Markup Language. I was awe-struck by how I could immediately change the appearance of something by manipulating something called “code”, and this code would do whatever I wanted. Hooked, for every web page thereafter that I visited, I would do something called “View Source”, and taught myself how to create websites through changing the code, asking: “What happens if I added this? What happens if I removed this?”. I didn’t know it, but I was laying the foundation for a career in the Tech industry.

After taking Psych 101 the first quarter of my freshman year in college, I became increasingly interested in the psychology of everything: what we do, how we use things, why we use them, etc. Taking Intro to Computer Science during my freshman year, I was hooked with the same sense of “oh my god I’m making this thing move, from writing a few lines of code!” I spent more time in the computer lab remember to type semicolon than any other punctuation marks that whole year.

A year of studying in France, combined with my multi-cultural upbringing, heightened my interest in cultural and social patterns, and how humans communicate. A new field called Usability Engineering was coming into formation, and I studied it and User Centered Design as one of my majors at the University of Washington iSchool.

College prepares you for many things, and opened your eyes to many new perspectives, but sometimes it does not give you the most practical tools or experience, those you have to seek out yourself. After using techniques and methodologies like Contextual Inquiry, Wireframing, Personas, Usability Surveys, Exploratory Design, I realized that I also wanted to take the findings and interpretations and not just report on them, but design things based on them.

From my curiosity in human communication, I’m learning as much about social media and marketing as I can. From my need to “just make stuff” and creating my own funny tshirts, I’m pursuing an Advanced Professional Certificate in Graphic Design at Sessions Online School of Design.

I currently work as a User Experience Designer at Slalom Consulting. I am a board member of the Puget Sound SIGCHI (Special Interest Group in Computer Human Interaction), a group of UX professionals in the … you guessed it, Puget Sound.