Hey there!

So, what do you actually do?

I design digital products, and for 20 years I've built quite a few of them myself (back when you still had to write every line by hand). These days, my work is mostly about understanding what a product needs to achieve, how it can serve both users and organisations, and what it will take to keep it alive. Most good design decisions are quiet ones. The interface is just the part you can see.

Designer, developer, or product person?

Definitely designer. But the most interesting stuff happens in between. I learned to code because I wanted my designs to work, and I learned product thinking because I wanted them to matter. I like sitting at a table with users, developers, product owners, and business people and understand all of them. Mostly, I help translate. A colleague once told me I'm good at asking the questions nobody wants to ask, or nobody has thought of yet.

You've done a lot of design system work. How come?

Over the years, I learned that almost nothing I work on stands alone. A button is part of component library, a product is part of a company strategy, a company is part of a market and society. Design systems were my way in: they're where design, code, and organisations meet, and where one small decision gets multiplied a thousand time. That multiplication fascinate me. What does it do to the people and places around it? And how does changing one small thing change the whole system?

And AI?

I'm fascinated by how fast it has evolved, it's capabilities but also it's limits. I'm curious about it the same way I was curious about mobile, new frameworks, and many innovations then. But this shift calls for more judgement: AI makes producing things cheap. Deciding what's worth producing, for whom, and at what cost remain human questions. Critical thinking, a soft spot for systems, and two decades of building things by hand help here a lot.

You've led design teams. What did that teach?

That leadership is design, too. You are shaping the conditions under which good works happens. The part I care about most is watching people outgrow what they thought they could do.

And teaching?

For three years, I taught design fundamentals to Human-Machine Interaction students. Explaining the basics to students who like to question everything kept me honest, and it reminded me that fundamentals outlast every tool.

What keeps you curious after all these years?

New problems, new domains, new people to work with and learn from. So if you have a project in mind — big, small, or still just a vague idea — I'd love to hear about it.

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