Who am I?
The breadth of my practise extends through creative design and construction of audio, visual, and gameplay experiences; to highly usable products designed with a focus on supporting both users and businesses.
I believe the experiences we create should also infuse a deeper meaning - Whether its strengthening the social consciousness of communities, producing excitement and intrigue through the exploration of artificial environments, confronting audiences with morally and ethically ambiguous futures, or actively supporting those who need it most before its required.
I aim to have my own business one day that will allow me to continue creating meaning and joy for people and communities. Until then - I want to learn, build myself, and experience as many perspectives as I can.
Design
Where I began…
My experience design career began after many years working in hospitality and creative industries. I realised UX was an amalgam of much of the work, thinking, and methods that I had employed in previous roles.
I have always struggled to understand why businesses would create products, services, and interact in ways that don't meet the needs of their customers.
I would think, this isn't difficult to fix, and find my brain iterating through possibilities for improvements and solutions.
UX and experience design provided me a framework for taking my thought process and communicating into something tangible.
I also learnt the joy of working collaboratively on problems and opportunities where I could experience everyone's unique perspectives, help enable growth in others thinking, and continue to develop beyond who I was yesterday.
On the spectrum
I've always felt different to those around me.
While the rest of the world seems to approach certain things in life as easily as breathing, for me they have been anything but natural.
I was diagnosed with ADHD and Autism in my 30's.
It's impossible to summarise all the differences that suddenly made sense, but it gave me insight into why my brain functions as it does and why, for me, design feels like breathing.
Below I've provided some additional information that mixes understandings of neurodiversity within the workplace and information personalised to myself.
Superpowers
"Superpower" is often a term associated with neurodiverse individuals and is used to highlight strengths and skills which may be associated with that individuals neurodiversity.
While allistics (individuals not effected by autism) might experience difficulties working with someone on the spectrum - Understanding an autists "superpowers" help to promote better utilisation and communication within the workplace.
"Superpowers" highlight strengths in aid of balancing out weakness as they relate to allistic societal norms. In other words a coin has 2 sides and society often only acknowledges the side of perceived disablement.
Patterns & Human Behaviour
Throughout life I've spent a lot of time working to understand those around me and is an ongoing personal study.
Allistic communication and autistic communication is simply, different. To function within an allistic society and workplace we develop strong pattern recognition abilities to help us better identify how we need to adjust ourselves.
Internally, pattern recognition feeds the overt signals and connections supplied by people and the environment. It is then processed thru models we have learnt or built to provide us with context. We often miss the subtlety that allistics observe but conversely allistics often get bogged down in fine detail and miss the obvious.
This isn't just a skill, but how our brains contextualise information and the world around us. Its the foundation for how we operate, see the world, and function within the workplace.
Within design and creative works this pattern recognition ability allows me to rapidly identify trends, opportunities, issues, and solutions at multiple different scales. Like in research synthesis practises, it processes information from what its saying into what its meaning.
Visual Processing
I am Dyslexic and struggle with reading, poorly constructed content, and disruptive layouts.
My brain processes text, content blocks and layouts as islands with negative space in-between. Because my brain struggles to process the hierarchy between islands and space, my vision produces interference patterns.
For me this is a painful experience but these interference patterns allow me to identify if information and layouts are structured well, have an appropriate density, and are readable.
Internal Processing
When being provided information I have longer digestion time than most. The length of time it takes reflects the medium of transmission.
To learn, digest, and understand information provided to me I need to build a mental model. These are an internalised structure of how information fits together. Once created, I can move, rotate and view the information for different perspectives.
Matching this with pattern recognition processes allows me to easily identify opportunities, gaps, connections, and pathways within a model.
In design I am at my best when working at a macro level. Observation, design and work from a broader ecosystem and architectural perspective provides me with the information I need for decision making when working granularly.
Getting to the point
Autistics are often described as communicating in a blunt, literal manner.
Truth and transparency is of high value to us and so that is how we communicate.
We struggle with small talk as it provided us little value, but thrive in deep meaningful balanced conversations.
In design I feel this also appears in a concise understanding of what to prioritise to delivering value, what is a nice to have, and what isn't needed.
More…
Many neurodivergents do not recognize their innate talents, making it difficult for us to see what we can offer a potential employer. Some of those strengths are:
Creativity
Focus
Attention to detail
Visual processing skills
Empathy
Curiosity
Ability to identify trends
Problem solving
Asking detailed questions
Recalling details
Fast processing speeds
Special interests that may be career related
For more on neurodiverse Superpowers check out:
HFS Research - Superpower of neurodiversity
Games
Creative experiences
When I was little I used to make games on pieces of A4 paper. I loved creating the basic mechanics, and then figuring out different play strategies.
In my teens I experimented with different game engines, tools for creating assets, and eventually managed to make some small games I was proud of.
For over a decade I have invested an enormous amount of time to learning the core concepts, psychology, and tools of digital and physical game design.
While I love making games I have also branched out to creating and selling tools for other game developers to use which you can find here:
Janky Gamesmiths
Sound
Music
At a young age began learning the guitar then found myself moving towards playing with DAWs.
I studied sound design, spent time recording in studios and eventually moved onto live performance.
Sound has always been a part of me and my thought processes. Rather than being drawn to structured melodic arrangement I was drawn to textures, artifacts, and the weight of sub frequencies - throwing away traditional structure for procedurally generated compositions.