Design Executive · UX Leader · Systems Thinker
The best solutions rarely start with technology. They start with understanding what people see, hear, feel, and experience every day.
That belief has guided my work from emergency healthcare and medical devices to workplace experience, AI, and education.
“You can't design for someone until you've spent time in their shoes.”
Years leading UX, service design, and innovation
Patents across healthcare and enterprise technology
FDA-cleared medical products brought from concept to market
Impacted through healthcare, workplace, and enterprise experiences
01 — How I Work
My process begins with lived experience, makes the whole system visible, and turns shared understanding into better decisions.
Research reveals the gap between how systems are intended to work and how people actually experience them. I spend time with users, customers, operators, and stakeholders to find friction and unmet needs.
Field research · observation · unmet needs
Products do not exist in isolation. Every experience connects to services, technology, policy, environment, and people. Service design and systems thinking make those relationships visible.
Service design · systems thinking · ecosystems
The best solutions emerge when design, research, engineering, operations, and business teams share ownership of the problem. Much of my work involves creating that alignment.
Co-creation · shared language · design direction
Research only matters when it changes decisions. I help teams move from insight to implementation while preserving the human needs that inspired the work.
Prototyping · implementation · measurable impact
02 — Personal Philosophy
Throughout my career I've learned that the most important design tool is not software, methodology, or process. It's curiosity.
Whether observing a clinician during a resuscitation, talking with a facilities employee navigating a campus, mentoring students, or helping teams adopt new technologies, I begin the same way: by understanding the world through someone else's experience.
I want to see what they see.
Hear what they hear.
Feel the pressures, interruptions, limitations, and realities that shape their decisions.
Because people rarely struggle with the problem we assume they have.
Good design begins when we understand the problem they are actually living.
“The best ideas come after observation, not before it.”
03 — Philips Healthcare
Over 16 years, I led global experience design across emergency care, radiology, hospital operations, and medical-device ecosystems—where research, human factors, and patient safety shaped every decision.
Human problem · Emergency care
Helping skilled responders read the situation and act quickly under extreme pressure.
Role
Interaction design · usability leadership
Human problem · Patient safety
Helping an untrained bystander act with confidence during sudden cardiac arrest.
Role
Interaction design · usability leadership
Human problem · Field research
Making rescue-data transfer fit the reality of a firefighter’s work after a call.
Role
Interaction design · usability leadership
Human problem · Service design
Reframing an AED as a connected care and service ecosystem, not a standalone device.
Role
Design direction · service design · experience strategy
Human problem · Hospital operations
Helping radiology teams see performance, coordinate service, and keep critical equipment available.
Role
Global design direction · experience leadership
Recognition · Proven in use
Recognition for work grounded in research, craft, patient safety, and measurable performance.
MFA Graphic Design, High Honors, RISD. BFA Graphic Design & Typography, UMass Dartmouth. Adjunct professor at the University of Washington and typography instructor at RISD.
patents granted across IBM and Philips Healthcare
FDA 510(k) clearances on shipped medical devices
monthly users on employee experiences I led
04 — Microsoft — Employee Experience
The human-centered approach developed in healthcare applied to a new system: how people plan their week, navigate campus, find support, and work with AI across physical and digital environments.
MyHub · Employee experience
One of the challenges of hybrid work is that many of the informal experiences that help people feel connected become harder to create. Teams are distributed. Schedules vary. Buildings become destinations rather than defaults.
How might we help employees confidently navigate campus while creating more opportunities for connection, collaboration, and community?
Leading design and research across Microsoft's MyHub ecosystem, I worked with a multidisciplinary team responsible for helping employees plan, navigate, and experience the workplace.
Research became a critical driver of the roadmap. Rather than assuming what employees needed, we spent time understanding how they moved through their day, where friction existed, and which moments mattered most.
One notable effort was the Amazing Race initiative, which transformed campus exploration into an engaging discovery experience. Through direct user involvement and observation, we learned how employees formed mental models of place, movement, and connection. Those insights informed broader improvements across multiple experiences within the MyHub ecosystem.
The result was not simply better applications. It was a more cohesive workplace experience designed around human needs rather than organizational structures.
Smart Buildings & Operational Intelligence
The best workplace experiences are built on operational systems most people never see.
At Microsoft, I spearheaded cross-functional initiatives with Global Workplace Services (GWS), CBRE, engineering teams, data scientists, and workplace operators to transform facilities from reactive environments into intelligent systems capable of learning, adapting, and making more informed decisions.
The challenge wasn't simply collecting more data.
The challenge was connecting employee experience, workplace operations, and building intelligence into a single ecosystem that could continuously improve how the workplace functioned.
Through service design, operational research, data visualization, and AI-driven insights, we helped establish Microsoft's Smart Buildings program, creating employee-facing experiences and operational platforms that enabled more proactive management of workplace environments.
Microsoft Places
A 0-to-1 product created in close collaboration between the Microsoft Places business group and MSD Studio, bringing weekly planning, teammate connection, desk booking, and campus navigation into one coherent experience.
Visit Microsoft PlacesStudio site walkthrough
MSD Studio · Design leadership
During significant shifts in the studio's support model, staffing, and organization, I created a new Studio website to guide education and establish a modern engagement model with product management and engineering partners.
Built with VS Code and Azure, the site made research and design easier to access, clarified how teams could engage the studio, and demonstrated a more direct way to work with PM and Engineering.
“Shared understanding, clear direction, and better decisions—not just artifacts.”
01
Research gives teams a common view of the human need.
02
Evidence and prototypes replace opinion.
03
Research finds misunderstandings before engineering begins.
04
Design, product, engineering, and operations work from one picture.
05
Tradeoffs are measured against the experience, not output volume.
ESS - Employee Self Service Agent
Employees needed routine tasks—PTO, benefits, commuting, and shuttles—to stop feeling like a search across disconnected systems.
AI Workshop — design learning in session
AI discovery · workshops
Product and business leaders learned to run human-centered AI discovery sprints through guided prompts, UX methods, and hands-on prototypes grounded in real user needs.
Workplace UX education series
A multi-part series extending research, accessibility, content, interaction, and visual design practice to partner teams — with the impact measured, not assumed.
Impact series
Satisfaction score across the series — measured session by session, not assumed.
Executive Briefing Center
5/5Average customer rating across Christian’s EBC engagements with external customers — sessions translating Microsoft’s workplace and AI practice into their own context.
Enterprise experience design
Event teams needed one coherent way to request, plan, and run events instead of scattered spreadsheets and forms.
65K+ annual events supported
50% reduction in planning cycle time
163.5K items automated monthly
05 — Teaching & mentorship
Teaching at UW and RISD, mentoring at GIX, and guiding leaders through Microsoft’s Executive Briefing Center are extensions of the same design leadership practice.
I teach through making, reflection, and honest critique. Learning moves fastest when the problem is real, the constraints are visible, and the outcome matters beyond the classroom.
University of Washington · School of Design
Advanced Interaction Design, information architecture, web design, and visual storytelling—grounded in public health and digital systems.
Teaching portfolio — PDF
University of Washington · GIX
A year mentoring a graduate capstone team from problem framing and field research to a working AI parking assistant.
Course proposals
Studio courses for graduate teams working on real problems with real constraints.
Elective 01
A rapid-cycle studio pairing two-week collaborative sprints with real problems, working prototypes, and critique.
2-week sprints · collaborative teams · AI-native making
Elective 02
Students study how rhythm, attention, and environment shape behavior, then design interfaces that inform without demanding.
Temporal cadence · cross-sensory systems · calm technology
Teaching & mentoring philosophy
I teach the same way I lead teams: through making, reflection, and honest critique. Learning happens fastest when the problem is real, the constraints are visible, and the outcome matters to someone beyond the classroom.
06 — Making as systems practice
My sculpture explores many of the same questions that drive my design work: rhythm, systems, movement, feedback, materiality, and how independent elements create coherent experiences.
Designing products, services, organizations, and physical objects begins with the same act: paying attention.
Creative disciplines
My RISD thesis explored rhythm and the senses as a foundation for human interaction. The inquiry continues through steel, wood, sand, light, photography, and music.
I build pieces that respond to their surroundings. Steel gives structure, wood gives warmth, and weather supplies the motion—separate parts finding a shared tempo.
The pieces move with the weather, not on a motor.
Featured Exhibitions
September 01 – September 30, 2026 · Mount Vernon, Washington
Visit Perry and Carlson07 — Working ideas
Notes on design, research, systems, and the practice of leading across disciplines.
Human-centered AI
AI becomes useful when it addresses a need people can name and feel.
Leadership
When clinicians, engineers, and business leaders disagree, they are usually arguing about which risk matters most.
Creative practice
A band is a distributed system with no central controller and no tolerance for latency.
Service design
Before improving a step, ask whether people should have to do it at all.
08 — Contact
If you’re shaping a complex experience, building a design practice, or exploring how research and systems thinking can move the work forward, I’d be glad to connect.
Emailcrhonda1@gmail.com