about me
I am technical communications professional living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a B.S. in Technical Writing in 1998, and an M.A. in Professional Writing in 2000.
I am enjoy working on many different types of projects, and I love a challenge! My non-professional interests include gardening, British television, and rugby.
design philosophy
When choosing a focus for my graduate program, I decided to integrate multiple disciplines, including human-computer interaction and document design. I also became interested in the intersection of rhetoric and information presentation: information design & architecture. What information is being presented, to what audience, for what purpose? How is that information organized, presented, and navigated? In order to effectively present information, in any form, you have to know your audience, and learn what they will and won't trust. Finding out what the audience will react to and what they believe is a crucial part of the process.
One of the mantras of human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon was "make easy things easy; make hard things possible." It's not always feasible to make everything easy, and there are many reasons for both hiding and showing complexity of actions. This shouldn't be just an HCI mantra, but one applied to information architecture in general. Whether creating interfaces or presenting a set of information, I want to make the simple, common items easy to locate, and I want to make uncommon, advanced, or difficult items possible to locate.
In anything I design, I want to promote readability, navigability, and usability. I feel that if people cannot find the information they are looking for, the design has failed. Recently, I've had the chance to apply this philosophy to the design of focus groups and surveys as well as more traditional information designs.