Oh, Hi!
I'm Michael — a full-time father of six (ages 11, 9, 7, 5 and 2yo twins……😓🤪)!
(On the side...) I am an award-winning Experience Designer rooted in equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging. I've spent 15 years across brand, product, visual, and physical design as well as film. Professionally, I'm most passionate about crafting experiences that serve the most vulnerable, marginalized and historically excluded populations.
As a creative lead I've worked with some pretty cool partners like the National Institutes of Health, The White House, AOL, the West Hollywood Sunset Strip, the University of Southern California, and the University of Pennsylvania. Today, I'm building equity-centered design strategy with Capital One.
My Design Philosophy
My overall philosophical approach to experience design is guided by a radical commitment to an essential ethic––good love, healthy choices, and second chances.
By good love I mean that my engagement in creative problem solving is human-centered, trauma-informed and grounded in equity. It means that when we design we prioritize an ethic of compassion, humility and empathy; we situate knowledge and discovery in historical contexts; we acknowledge and seek to redistribute power dynamics; we center the voices of those marginalized by design and co-create (whenever possible) with the community for whom we design. This is justice, and "justice is what love looks like in public" (Dr. Cornel West).
Healthy choices means I am intentional about redesigning systems in synchrony with the socio-economic health and psychological safety of those likely to experience our products and services. For example, I will routinely challenge myself and my peers, direct reports, and leadership on perceived tradeoffs between achieving business goals and meeting human needs. This means we are proportionate in the ways 'benefits' and 'harms' of a given experiences are being distributed amongst customers. It means we are never requiring a customer to make a choice between their livelihood and what serves the company's interests.
Second chances means I ensure that the conditions are met to provide systems of care that are responsive to the impact of adversity on the mental, emotional, economic health of employees, leaders and customers. We maintain a safe space for fast failure — in relatively low-stakes conditions — and embrace feedback that improves our ethic of care, the process we use to create, and/or the experience for customers.
These essential pillars of my philosophy — in conjunction with certain refinements to other technical dimensions of design (i.e., design thinking, service design, design research methodologies, human-centered design, etc.) — engenders an environment of self-accountability, institutional self-awareness, and responsibility for customer needs and success without sacrificing on market relevance and business growth, nor sacrificing the social and emotional equipment that makes us all full human beings.
Lightning Round
Hobbies:
• Playing with my kids
• Watching movies with an unnecessarily high degree of intense criticality
• Learning new languages (currently learning classical Arabic and American Sign Language)
• Playing with my kids
• Watching movies with an unnecessarily high degree of intense criticality
• Learning new languages (currently learning classical Arabic and American Sign Language)
Recent Readings
• Design Justice by Sasha Costanza-Chock
• The Black Experience in Design by Rittner, Berry, Collie, Laker
• Measure What Matters by John Doerr
• Design Justice by Sasha Costanza-Chock
• The Black Experience in Design by Rittner, Berry, Collie, Laker
• Measure What Matters by John Doerr
Design challenge I'm most interested in tackling:
How might we transform design conventions (values, frameworks, processes, ways of knowing) to avoid reproducing systems of oppression through intersectionality and equity-centered approaches?
How might we transform design conventions (values, frameworks, processes, ways of knowing) to avoid reproducing systems of oppression through intersectionality and equity-centered approaches?
