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 · Emergency care
Helping untrained bystanders act with confidence in the first minutes of cardiac arrest.
Role
Interaction design · usability lead, then head of design
Human problem · Emergency care
Getting rescue data off the device without getting in a firefighter’s way.
Role
Interaction design · usability lead
Human problem · Emergency care
Rethinking the AED as a connected system of people, services and places, not a box on a wall.
Role
Design direction · strategy · workshop facilitation
Human problem · Hospital operations
Helping hospitals see how their imaging equipment performs, and turning service from repair calls into a partnership.
Role
Design business lead · experience strategy
Human problem · Hospital partnership
Turning two competing businesses into one partner for the hospitals they both serve.
Role
Project lead · design direction
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.
Human problem · Hybrid work
Making the trip to the office worth it: who’s in, where to sit, how to get there, and where to eat.
Design leadership · experience strategy
Human problem · Workplace operations
Following the employee journey into the operations behind it, and bringing AI into both.
Design leadership · AI experience strategy
Enterprise experience design
One coherent way to request, plan, and run events instead of scattered spreadsheets and forms.
65K+ annual events supported
Design leadership
A new studio website that guided education and established a clearer engagement model with product and engineering partners.
A modern way to engage design
05 — Leadership
How I build teams, give design a real seat at the table, and measure what matters.
06 — 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.
Roots · Graduate work
Where the name rhythmramble comes from, and why I design for all the senses.
Download Graduate Thesis (PDF)Before I designed medical devices or workplaces, I studied rhythm. My MFA thesis at the Rhode Island School of Design (Graphic Design, High Honors, 2005) explored how natural and artificial rhythms—like heartbeats, traffic lights, and the movement of the sun—form an invisible infrastructure that people respond to without noticing.
Design can make those rhythms visible, and let people take part in them. I called this practice holistic attention.
Traffic Music · 2004
I filmed a city intersection from above and treated its signals, crossings, and flow of cars as a score. Traffic lights set the tempo; people and vehicles play the notes.
Traffic Music — 75 seconds.
Car music experience · 2005
What if you could hear what’s behind you instead of checking the mirror? I mounted Arduino sensors on the back of a car, wired to a laptop running Max/MSP, to move information from vision to hearing while driving. As a car approached, calm audio became fast and aggressive, then settled once it passed.
Making by hand
For the thesis book, I tore the top layer off corrugated cardboard, poured paint into the exposed channels, dripped it onto vellum, and scanned the results as imagery. The habit started earlier: as an undergraduate at UMass Dartmouth, I spent an entire semester drawing a single apple. That is where I learned to sketch ideas before building them, and why so much of my professional work starts in pen and watercolor.
Teaching
At RISD, I taught sophomore typography in Winter Session and served as a teaching assistant: grid, structure, proportion, and composition. I now teach as an adjunct professor at the University of Washington.
The same ideas run through my professional work: an AED coaches the rhythm of a heartbeat; a workplace app notices the rhythm of a commute and speaks up at the right moment. My personal work continues the inquiry through kinetic light, sand, photography, and Windows.
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.
07 — 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 bread hallway
I covered the hallway outside a classroom with slices of bread and watched how people found their way through it. Some refused to step on them; some tiptoed; some walked straight across. The smell became part of the experience. It was a small study in the senses and in social behavior: how people read an unexpected environment and decide what to do.
RISD sensory experiment, 2005.
Windows · Ongoing
Windows is a growing collection of footage of patterns seen through the windows of different modes of transportation, gathered over many years and countries. It continues the thesis inquiry into rhythm, movement, attention, and how a changing frame reorganizes what we notice.
The pieces move with the weather, not on a motor.
Selected work at Perry and Carlson.
Featured Exhibitions
September 01 – September 30, 2026 · Mount Vernon, Washington
Visit Perry and Carlson08 — Working ideas
Notes on design, research, systems, and the practice of leading across disciplines.
My graduate thesis began with a simple observation: rhythm is the invisible infrastructure of human experience. Heartbeats, breath, rain, and circadian cycles move alongside traffic flow, digital interfaces, and architectural sequences. We understand the world through the ways these natural and artificial rhythms meet, synchronize, and break apart.
I called the practice of sensing those relationships holistic attention. It means attending to the whole field—the intervals, textures, sounds, movements, and connections that sit beneath routine experience—rather than isolating a single object or event.
Design can become a window of awareness rather than an object in itself.
Inspired by Robert Irwin's shift from making pictures of things toward considering the things themselves, this work moved my practice from designing objects to creating windows of awareness and intuitive connection. That inquiry became the conceptual origin of Rhythm & Ramble: making familiar interactions newly visible, participatory, and resonant.
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.
09 — 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