Senior Product Designer
Design shaped by art, empathy, and code.
I'm a product designer with an unusual background: fine arts, customer service, and frontend engineering. That combination sounds scattered until you realize it's exactly what product design demands—aesthetic judgment, deep user empathy, and the ability to speak engineering fluently.
I've run an arts cooperative, interned at a museum overseas, logged years on support calls, and shipped code as a web developer. Now I bring all of it to design.
Background
Co-founded and ran a creative collective. Learned that good ideas need operational sustainability—and that leading artists is like herding very opinionated cats.
Took a ferry across the strait to intern at the Shanghai Art Museum. Designed educational programming that made contemporary art feel less intimidating and more human.
Spent years on the front lines, fielding calls from frustrated users. Nothing builds empathy faster than being the person who has to say "I understand" and actually mean it.
Broke into tech as a frontend developer. Loved building, but kept gravitating toward the "why" behind the "what." Pivoted to design and never looked back.
How I work
I think of my background as three lenses:
The art lens— Composition, tension, emotional resonance. I notice when something feels off by two pixels, and I care about the details most people won't consciously register but will absolutely feel.
The empathy lens— Years in customer service taught me that users aren't edge cases to be handled; they're people having a bad day who just want something to work. I design for them first.
The engineering lens— My dev background means I think about constraints and implementation from the start, not as an afterthought. I discuss technical tradeoffs early, optimize for clean handoffs, and speak fluently with engineers about what's feasible and what's worth fighting for.
This means I bridge the gap between design and engineering—not by writing production code, but by designing with real-world constraints baked in from day one.
What I focus on
- Systems thinking and scalable design architecture
- User research that actually informs decisions
- Early constraint mapping and implementation-aware design
- Visual craft and obsessive attention to detail
- Accessible, cross-cultural design
Outside of Work
Building
Doom Pile Destroyer, an AI chat companion app that helps people break down overwhelming clutter and task paralysis into manageable steps. I'm using it to stay hands-on with LLM integration, prompt design, and shipping a real product end-to-end.
It lives under BlueRose Imaginarium, my personal label for side projects. The name's a nod to Twin Peaks' impossible cases and Terry Gilliam's Imaginarium felt right for work that sits at the edge of practical and a little strange.
Rewatching
Twin Peaks, for the third (fourth?) time. Still noticing new details. Still unsettled by that ceiling fan. The owls are not what they seem.
Watching
Mr Ballen and The Why Files on YouTube. Strange-but-true stories and deep dives into the unexplained—the perfect wind-down after a day of making interfaces make sense.
Exploring
The trails around Capital Forest in Olympia. Nothing resets my brain like a few hours in the woods where the cell signal dies and the only decisions are "left fork or right fork."