Welcome

I’m passionate about human-centred design for personal informatics systems

I am an interaction, user experience researcher and educator with expertise in ethnographically informed design, human-centred design, and participatory design. I want to create social impact by designing socio-technical systems that deliver meaningful experiences between people, technology, and data, understanding and representing human needs through digital interactions that improve people’s daily life.

The challenges

I consider three main challenges in research and education:

To contribute to social innovation by the design of localized personal technologies that can be better integrated into people’s daily life.

To build on a broader systemic scale towards better design solutions that consider not only a single user, but the entire structure of relationships between users, organizations, and culture.

To enable users (community) and institutions to play an active role in Industry 4.0 as new advances in information and communication are shaping our daily life in an accelerated fashion.

My focus

My work aims to close the gap between systems’ functionality and users’ empowerment by prioritizing meaningful interactions as users play an active role in contributing, reflecting, and learning from the large amount of data collected by these technological systems.

In order to achieve this, I look for strategies to enhance an understanding of people’s experiences and behaviours in context by integrating qualitative (user-driven) and quantitative (sensed-driven) data analysis. This unfolds richer insights to inform design decisions that elicit more meaningful experiences of users with technology-mediated solutions.

The approach

  • I conduct design research for all the stages of the design process.
  • I empathize with all the actors involved
  • I strive for context-sensitive solutions that consider the complexity of the user’s circumstances.
  • I participate in collaborative work in which stakeholders are part of the design team.
  • I build ties across disciplines.
  • I promote a close integration between research and education.

The methods I use

I apply a strategic approach from generative to evaluative research of the product/service design process. With a methodical and iterative focus, I use a diverse set of Human-Centered design, Design Thinking, and UX methods. In particular:

  • Generative research to get a foundational understanding of human behavior and their experience of products.
  • In-field participatory research techniques that involves users and stakeholders in the design process.
  • Ethnography, longitudinal studies with digital research tools that collects users’ personal experiences, emotions, and social context collected in-situ.
  • Experiment design for testing and validation.
  • Qualitative and quantitative analysis.

Internationalization

Research and education have been for me a journey of discovery, of who I am, the world around me, and my contribution to society. This journey so far has opened the doors to share and implement my design perspectives and tools across cultures. This journey has provided me with values, understanding of differences to enhance cultural awareness, inclusion, and sensitivity, which are important aspects not only for any design process but also for my personal career development as a design researcher and educator in human-centered design.

Areas of expertise

  • Healthcare & wellness
  • Personal and community informatics
  • Social innovation
  • User’s behavior
  • Citizenship data
  • Telemedicine
  • Service design
  • Experience based design