AI Strategy
Research
Research first. Rulebook out. Redefine the form.
Every project in this record is traceable to a question that existed before the answer did.
Not trend-driven. Problem-driven.
Designing for the people that systems tend to forget.
For most of this career, the research has gone to the same place: the people the existing design was not built for. People diagnosed with serious mental illness who are homeless. Veterans with PTSD who do not realize they need help. Children who need physical therapy but cannot access it. Children with trauma who need safe spaces to heal.
In every case, the research found the same thing. The existing design had been built around who the system assumed would show up — not who actually did. Research has never been a phase in a process. It has been the thing that makes design honest.
Selected research
Across domains. The same approach.
Healthcare, logistics, experience design, and AI-assisted brand strategy. The approach has been the same in every case: understand the people first, then figure out what design can actually do for them.
Logistics
FedEx Global Air Freight
Healthcare
PTKids Teletherapy
Healthcare
Magellan Complete Care
How the research actually works
The synthesis happens on paper.
Research is not useful until it has been worked through. Not just collected — mapped, coded, and organized until patterns emerge that were not visible in the raw data.
Most designers want to skip this step. The pressure is always to move to form. The synthesis is the work that earns the form — the affinity diagrams, the journey maps, the player profiles, the stakeholder maps. It is where a hundred pieces of evidence become a shape the design can follow.
A design that skips synthesis is not faster. It is aimed at the wrong target.
A framework thirty years in the making
Why designs fail to achieve their goal.
After thirty years of designing across healthcare, logistics, enterprise software, experience design, and therapeutic games, the patterns of failure are consistent. Not because designers are careless or incompetent — but because the conditions for failure are built into the way the industry works.
“When you’re in the weeds and a design fails, you feel like you did something wrong. Or you feel powerless. Or people yell at you for caring.”
Wrong role or user type
The design was built for someone who was not the actual user. No amount of iteration fixes a design aimed at the wrong person.
Right user, wrong assumptions
The designer identified the right person but made faulty assumptions about who they are, what they know, and how they make decisions.
Wrong problem or wrong part of the process
The design solved something — just not the thing that was actually broken. The research had to go further to find where the real problem lived.
Wrong solution for the right problem
The problem was correctly identified but the solution missed it. Research pointed to visibility and control. The design delivered a cleaner booking flow.
Unable to design the right solution
The research found the right answer. The technology, scope, or budget made it impossible to build. This is not a design failure.
Research at the wrong level or scope
The research was conducted, but not at the right depth, with the right people, in the right context. Asking in a conference room is not the same as watching them work.
Design disconnected from research
The research was right. The design ignored it. This is the most common and the most preventable failure. The work on Global Air Freight ended here.
Right solution, not fully implemented
Leadership decided not to implement the design, or only implemented part of it. Designers absorb this as if it were their fault.
Right solution, partial build
The design was correct and approved, but developer resources or time constraints meant only part of it was built. The design shipped incomplete.
Active research program
A five-year research commitment. Still in progress by design.
The Mythos research program began with the MFA thesis at Miami University in 2021: 46 family surveys, 6 in-depth family interviews, interviews with play therapists, affinity mapping, and clinical co-design. The question: how might we use play to help adopted children work through trauma so they can form healthy attachments?
The result was Mythos — a therapist-mediated role-playing game built on five trauma-informed developmental principles. The prototype took five years to become buildable. The tooling gap that had held the work back was closed by AI-assisted development. The game now exists as a playable prototype.
The research program continues. An active usability study is currently underway with adopted children with complex trauma. A paper on the BrandForge framework has been accepted at HCI International 2026. A presentation on the five-year research arc is submitted to the Serious Play Conference 2026. The work is current. The commitment is unchanged.
Scholarship
The work that made it to print.
MFA Thesis — Miami University, 2021
Utilizing Play to Help Adopted Children Form Healthy Attachments
Published — OhioLINK ETD
CHI PLAY 2021 — ACM Extended Abstracts
Utilizing Virtual Play to Help Adopted Children with Trauma
Published — ACM Digital Library
HCI International 2026
BrandForge: A Framework for Generating Brand Systems from Personality and Context
Accepted — Late Breaking Posters, Springer CCIS
Serious Play Conference 2026
Research First, Game Last: The Making of Mythos
Submission pending notification
Working Paper
From Physical Playrooms to Digital Worlds
Outline prepared. Not yet submitted.
06 — Contact
Let’s talk about what your program needs next.
Direct conversation, no pitch deck. Tell me what your program is wrestling with and where it’s behind. I’ll respond with how the method addresses it.
