about

I’m drawn to the process of uncovering what’s really going on—the hidden bottlenecks and the overlooked possibilities.

For over 30 years, I have worked at the intersection of creativity, technology, and the human experience, designing experiences, centered in the emotional dimension of people and human behavior. I’ve collaborated with visionaries such as Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, and Rosalind Picard, developing ways to navigate complexity with clarity and insight.

While earlier work on emotions and affect (e.g., Norman, Picard) established the importance of emotion in design, my early work on Emotion-Centered Design (2015) as a method, was significant because it established emotion as the primary organizing principle of design practice—moving beyond usability and engagement metrics toward dignity, trust, and human experience at a systemic level, years before such concerns became mainstream in technology and service design. Also, the 10 Emotion Heuristics (2007) were among the first to explicitly use emotional expression—such as facial cues inspired in Ekman’s work—as a practical heuristic framework for assessing usability. This method was adopted by Microsoft UX Worldwide in 2020.

In parallel, I have always been an “experience collector.” My path has never been linear; I have been an artist, journalist, entrepreneur, inclusive choreographer, and real estate investor. I have acted as a “whisperer” for investors and CEOs, and also became a facial expression expert in the early 90s. And many more. My perspective is shaped as much by sitting with great thinkers as it is by surviving the extremes of life—from being kidnapped by a NYC taxi, escaping from a a taxi explosion in Barcelona, working as an Innkeeper at a Chelsea hotel, becoming TriBeCa messenger or sound technician at the Merce Cunningham studio. This breadth allows me to read rooms and people with unique precision. (Meeting the late Paul Ekman was a profound personal and professional honor.)

Alongside leading Raising the Floor, a non-profit focused on digital equity, I work one-to-one with individuals navigating moments of significant change—those times when things may look fine on the outside, but require deep reflection and a fresh perspective.

I don’t offer solutions. I offer an unhurried space to think — to see patterns, name what matters, and decide what comes next.