About
A practice built from the work between the deliverables.
I'm a designer, researcher, and facilitator with roots in service design, design systems, and research methods. My background includes enterprise consulting at AKQA (designing for Delta's full digital ecosystem and Chick-fil-A's holiday campaigns), design systems practice at Calendly during hyper-growth, facilitation curriculum design with Harvard Business School through Superfriendly, and enterprise DAM governance at Intuit.
The listening tour methodology I use and teach came from a pattern I kept noticing across client engagements: the most useful thing you can do before designing a fix is understand how the people inside a system have actually learned to operate it, which is rarely how it was designed to work.
How this started
Zen Design Labs emerged from a pattern. After a decade of enterprise and agency work (designing systems for Delta, Calendly, Intuit, and others), the work that kept finding me was the work between the deliverables: the conversations that helped teams name what was wrong, the sessions that left rooms changed, the research that surfaced what the analytics couldn't explain.
The pattern was consistent enough that I had to name it. The most valuable thing I could offer most organizations was help understanding their own system before committing to a fix. That conviction, that you have to understand before you can intervene, is the through-line of this practice.
ZDL is where that conviction lives as an explicit offering rather than a bonus that comes with the UX work.
Who I work with
Creative teams and creative business leaders. Studios, knowledge-led organizations, agencies — the people who work at the intersection of ideas and execution, where the complexity is human as much as it is operational.
This is a deliberate focus. Creative organizations have a particular kind of friction that doesn't surface in dashboards: the unspoken creative hierarchy, the tension between artistic and commercial instincts, the way "trust the process" becomes a way of not naming the process. These organizations benefit from the same diagnostic rigor as any other (listening tours, facilitated sessions, research design), applied with fluency in how creative work actually operates.
How I work now
The practice currently runs in a few different modes. I'm embedded at Figures & Figures, an information design studio, as a change holder — working inside the studio as the human layer that keeps the team grounded and connected while the work happens. That engagement is as much listening as it is facilitating: noticing what's being carried, surfacing what the team can't name yet, creating the conditions for honest conversation.
That embedded model sits alongside the more project-based work: listening tours, facilitated workshops, design principles development, and research scoping that reshapes what an organization thinks it needs before it builds the thing.
Where this is going
I'm growing the practice in two directions at once.
The first is immersive team retreats for creative organizations at inflection points — off-site experiences designed for the conversations that can't happen in a conference call or a morning workshop. When a team needs to reset its relationships before it can reset its strategy, a well-designed off-site is the right container. I'm currently developing this work and accepting a limited number of pilot engagements.
The second is AI transformation for creative teams. AI is changing creative work faster than most studios can absorb it, and most AI consulting is built for enterprise adoption, with little to say to a creative organization trying to figure out what this means for its practice. I work with creative teams to make that transformation on their own terms: not just which tools to adopt, but how to build sovereignty over your data, your creative process, and your organizational decision-making.
That second thread has a community dimension too. I do public education on disrupting big tech through open, data-sovereign infrastructure. The question of who controls creative workers' tools and data is bigger than technology.