I’m a UX researcher, product developer, and entrepreneur with a PhD in communication and thirty years bridging user needs, technology, and business — across research, consumer electronics, healthcare startups, and AI.
The lens is older than the UX career. It began in a 1994 master’s thesis that reopened Claude Shannon’s model of communication to argue that meaning is not a payload passed between minds but an effect of statistical and differential structure in language — the foundational view transformers would vindicate at scale three decades later (Returning to the Source). Since 1995 I’ve carried the same lens into the field under many names — conversation analysis, situated action, distributed cognition — from a conversation-analytic usability study of an early agent-based PDA to instrumented research on today’s AI. The method, and the work that proves it, lives on The Practice.
I’ve also built the things, not only studied them: co-founded two IoT startups (raising over $7M in venture capital, one acquired in healthcare), co-founded a product-development agency, helped start a pre-seed healthcare fund, and spent six years leading UX and IP at a major accessories maker, where I’m a named inventor on five patents. The throughline at every altitude is the same question — how do people, agents, tools, and institutions act together when plans are incomplete and repair is inevitable?
I serve on the board of directors of Free Black Thought, a California nonprofit dedicated to viewpoint diversity — where I worked with the AI development firm ThinkDeeply and the web studio ByTheWay Labs to create the FBT Voices project: AI-powered author sites featuring CiteMap, an archive that collects a scholar’s work and links every summary back to its original source — the same provenance discipline the essays here argue for. It launched with a site for professor and author Wilfred Reilly (case study).
I’m looking for my next role: research or product strategy where situated, evidence-driven thinking about human–AI interaction is the point, not the garnish. If that’s a conversation worth having, the note below reaches me directly — or find me on LinkedIn.
A family of agent-native products shipped as research probes: Suminar (situated source agents for scholarly texts) and Mem·Sum (shared memory for one to five people) live in public beta with open-source kernels; Mail·Sum, an email-fed private Sum, under construction. No house chatbot, no server-side inference, operators content-blind by construction — the design philosophy of this site, shipped. Read the case study →
A multi-track usability lab that records a session as parallel, time-aligned tracks — speech, screen, task state, and a physical feedback controller treated as a turn in the conversation, not a measurement. Patrick Squire’s concept and SentiMeter hardware; my methodology, notation, and agent-driven analysis pipeline. Read the case study →
Recurring UX-research engagements at Google. During COVID I designed the Google Meet telehealth onboarding that let Encore Healthcare’s respiratory clinicians treat patients without entering their homes; most recently, research on how people understand, trust, and act on AI-mediated experiences. Read the case study →
UX research and generative-AI design for healthcare clients. For Encore Healthcare, designed NexusGPT — an assistant that synthesizes a COPD patient's prescriptions, spirometry readings, and progress notes into insights and protocol recommendations during remote calls, on the Nexus platform Evermind built. For sovaSage, a conversational assistant that gives sleep coaches a full patient picture that once took minutes of tab-hunting before every call. For Eventa Healthcare, an LLM-powered Word add-in that surfaces past-visit summaries inside the current progress note, for respiratory therapists who document from their cars after home visits. All of it grounded in longitudinal 1:1 research — low-fidelity prototypes refined across sessions, sometimes with the same clinician a dozen times.
Founded a venture-funded aging-in-place IoT company — appliance sensors that signalled an older person’s daily routines to family without cameras or wearables. Its HIPAA-compliant monitoring platform was acquired by Encore Healthcare in 2017. Read the case study →
Co-founded a Nashville product-development agency built on a “design, develop, deploy” method. Its signature project: fully conceiving, designing, and developing the bēm wireless speaker line for a client — including a multi-room system of detachable speakers that pair to one source and scatter through the home, an idea the wireless-speaker industry is still copying. The line reached Costco.
Conceived splitsecnd — a plug-in crash-detection device combining accelerometer, GPS, and cellular in a 12-volt dongle that detects an accident and automatically calls for help.
Helped launch one of the first pre-seed healthcare-innovation funds — shaping its model and advising and selecting early-stage startups.
Built the UX-research and shopper-research program — and two labs — at a leading maker of mobile-device accessories, managed the IP portfolio (a named inventor on five patents), and helped grow the business from $5M to $300M in revenue. Read the case study →
Created Art Mobs — unofficial, student-made iPod audio guides for MoMA that put a second voice in the gallery. Covered by the New York Times, the BBC, and On the Media. Read the case study →
Named inventor on five U.S. patents: a magnetic connector; a digital controller and transmitter for portable electronic devices; a receiver for an audio player; a device for monitoring multiple broadcast signals; and a passive monitoring system.
Ph.D., Communication Studies & Rhetoric — The University of Texas at Austin, with a dissertation on dialectic in Plato’s Phaedrus (Collection and Division). M.A. and B.A., Human Communication — Abilene Christian University, where my 1994 master’s thesis reopened Shannon’s model of communication — the argument I revisit in Returning to the Source. Former professor of communication at Marymount Manhattan, Denison, and Concordia, and an adjunct at Lipscomb’s School of TransformAging, where I taught design thinking to long-term-care clinicians.
I’ve also brought design thinking into industry as a facilitator: a new-product-development session for Best Buy’s Exclusive Brands team built around the Stanford d.school’s Wallet Project (Minneapolis, 2012), and a design-thinking exercise for the staff of the Tennessee Commission on Aging and Disability (2013, with Charla Long) — the same methodology I taught at Lipscomb and brought to the 2013 LeadingAge Tennessee Annual Conference.
If something here resonates — or you think I’ve got it wrong, or you’re hiring for it — I’d like to hear from you. Notes come straight to my inbox, and I answer them myself.