Freescaling is an improvisation-first music methodology — play leads learning, not the other way around. Developed by a professional jazz pianist, the system depended on live, intuitive feedback and existed only as written material.

My challenge was to translate that embodied, responsive teaching style into a remote, digital experience. I designed and coded the Rhythmetrics Engine, a dynamic interaction system that can be altered on the go by user input, allowing players to practice improvisation by improvising.

The engine became the core of a modular app and website, supporting five distinct Freescaling modes and a living, interactive songbook. Rather than replicating a classroom, the experience encodes the instructor’s intuition into the interface itself — making exploration, feedback, and discovery feel alive, musical, and self-propelling.

Watkinson School has a progressive educational philosophy that resists traditional marketing language. Rather than trying to “explain” the school, I designed a system that lets the community speak for itself.

The Watkinson Story Vault is a continually growing collection of short, unscripted videos from students, parents, teachers, and alumni. I intentionally keep production lightweight — filmed casually on my phone — to preserve authenticity and reduce any sense of “slickness” or performativity. Authenticity is the goal.

By designing a container rather than a script, the system encourages genuine stories that naturally communicate values, culture, and impact. The result has been immediate and powerful: prospective families regularly reference specific videos that moved them when they arrive on campus. See the Story Vault.

Emergent began as a live workshop designed to help people get unstuck — not through instruction, but through intuition. The core mechanic is a deck of evocative, ambiguous images I describe as “Rorschach meets Tarot”, designed to prompt reflection rather than prescribe meaning.

When the pandemic made in-person workshops impossible, I redesigned Emergent as an online interactive experience, preserving its open-ended, reflective nature in a digital format. The challenge was to translate a deeply human, facilitation-based experience into a system that could stand on its own, maintaining the essential pleasures of ambiguity and discovery.

The result is a self-guided game that invites projection, interpretation, and meaning-making, demonstrating how interaction design can support intuition rather than control it.

Playable at emergentgame.com.

At first glance, the problem seemed straightforward: track attendance and bus locations more efficiently. But early conversations revealed that the real pain wasn’t technical — it was emotional. Administrators were frustrated, parents were anxious to know where their kids were, and staff were overloaded by systems that technically “worked” but failed under real-world pressure.

Rather than rushing to interface design, we prioritized deep, repeatable research. Over several months, I led and synthesized interviews and observation sessions with administrators, drivers, and families, listening not just for feature requests but for stress, confusion, and breakdowns in trust.

Those insights reshaped the product direction. We designed an experience focused on clarity, reassurance, and accountability — emphasizing glanceable status, predictable flows, and clear feedback. We tested and iterated many generations of wireframes and prototypes, making sure the system supported users in motion, under time pressure, and in emotionally charged moments.

The resulting app aligned operational needs with human realities, reducing friction not just by adding features, but by designing interactions that respected attention, emotion, and context.

Solu expanded from physical meditation speakers into a digital app experience, with a desire to bring warmth, humor, and beauty into users’ daily routines. The request was simple — add a changing message — but the opportunity was experiential: how could a single moment set the emotional tone of the day?

Working within Solu’s established design system, I designed a daily mantra card that paired imagery and language to create a brief, intentional pause. The interaction was designed to feel lightweight and human, a moment of delight rather than instruction, balancing calm with playfulness.

To support the broader experience, I also directed and produced a promotional video for the speakers using Solu’s iconic stop-motion puppets, extending the brand’s personality across motion, timing, and sound.

Together, the app feature and video created a cohesive, cross-medium expression of the Solu brand, showing how small, well-crafted moments can make all the difference.

This online financial aid application is used by thousands of families navigating an emotionally charged and highly complex process. For many parents, the experience is stressful, time-sensitive, and deeply personal, making clarity and reliability as important as visual design.

I led the UX design of a multi-step, data-heavy workflow, focusing on progressive disclosure, clear feedback, and predictable interaction patterns to reduce cognitive load. High-fidelity prototypes were carefully annotated to align developers, stakeholders, and clients around shared intent, minimizing ambiguity in both experience and implementation.

Given the sensitivity of the data and the diversity of users, the product required continual usability, accessibility, and security testing. Iterative validation ensured the experience remained compliant, resilient, and humane, even as requirements evolved.

The result was an application that balanced operational complexity with emotional intelligence, helping users move through a difficult process with confidence and dignity.

Emotion is often treated as a side effect of design. With The Wreck Deck, emotion is the product.

Funded in under 24 hours on Kickstarter, the deck contains 99 images representing difficult emotional states. There are no instructions, interpretations, or goals; what’s transformative is simply to be with whatever’s present.

Designing the deck required literal layers of intuition and craft: each card is composed of multiple “ancestor images” that combine in evocative and unpredictable ways to create visuals that move you. Read more of the story at thewreckdeck.com.

Texting is notoriously bad at conveying tone. Emojis help — but they don’t always transmit the right sensation.

MagiMoji was designed to carry a specific emotional frequency: beautiful, expressive, relational. The goal was to offer users a new visual vocabulary they could use when they wanted to convey the sensation of a magical moment.

The project required calibration of a visual-emotional pattern language and a deep sensitivity to how people actually communicate in moments when words fail. The app is currently in development for re-release.

This cookbook was created for people with difficulty chewing and swallowing — a constraint that shaped every design decision. The challenge was to make visually similar foods (primarily smooth soups and custards) feel distinct, appealing, and navigable.

I approached the project using core UX principles: empathy, clarity, hierarchy, and iteration. Photography focused on subtle variation and warmth, while page layouts were designed to support focus and reduce cognitive load during cooking.

Although this was a print piece rather than a digital artifact, the design thinking required used all the core approaches of UX: empathy, clarity, simplification, iteration, testing.