Five Questions is a monthly series profiling argodesign creatives, highlighting their influences and inspirations.
How do you Think by Making?
A designer has best chance at impact if they can show their ideas as close to their intended form as possible. If you can make a person believe it’s the real thing, you will get much better feedback on your work. To keep up my technology sketching skills, I let my micro-obsessions roam free. Whenever a new technology or a new piece of creative software comes out, I just HAVE to play with it. These could be tools for creative coding, 3D rendering, or even image generation. While some people might see these things as rabbit holes or a waste of time, I see it as investments in the future. Every time I've followed one of these micro-obsessions, they've found their place into client work. I feel it keeps my inner nerd fed and my mind sharp.
What’s one of the gnarliest design problems you’ve ever solved?
I once was presented with a design challenge for a team of developers. They were working on a system of over 200 documents that all had relationships to each other. To make a change, the developers would have to open many documents at the same time and create a mental map in their heads of how things worked together. To make things more interesting, many of these documents served different purposes at the same time, so making a single change could corrupt the set. When interviewing the developers, my team and I figured out that there was a common language that was established: whiteboard diagrams. We ended up developing a visualization tool that allowed everyone involved to point to things while discussing necessary updates.
What’s your current obsession?
My current obsession is storytelling. I have a 2-year-old son who I read books to every night. With the march of AI, I see a big push towards automated storytelling like generative voice overs, or personalized books that make our kids the main character. While these things look very exciting at first glance, I feel they are skipping over 2 important facets of storytelling: engaging your kids’ imagination and bonding between parent and kid. I’ve been playing with different types of storytelling, like recording audiobooks for my son, or playing with other interactive methods like choose your own adventure stories that expand their capabilities with AI, without doing it all for you.
If you could remove one word from the design dictionary, what would it be?
Prototype. Designers have adopted the word “prototype” to describe interactive designs, like clickable mockups in Figma. Design isn’t the last step in creating new products; it’s often the first. Our work needs to be understood and used by many different disciplines down the line. Traditionally, the term prototyping was used to test if a particular technology works— in our case in code. When working with developers, who realize our designs, this often creates confusion. If we’re using the same word to mean very different things, it’s easy to get lost in translation.
I’m a big believer in naming things clearly and using the right language to make communication easier. That’s why I’ve started calling interactive designs “simulations.” They simulate what we want an interface to look, behave, and feel like. They’re not tests of a technology stack or capability—they’re about user experience.
What’s a product or interface you consider to be well-designed?
The Elektron Digitakt is a drum sampler used to make electronic music. I bought one during Covid, and it has remained one of my favourite instruments to use when creating music. When you take a first look at the device it might seem daunting. There are many buttons with different labels.
