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Design Methods
Design is as much about how you think as what you make.
Over time, I’ve developed a flexible set of methods to navigate complex, often ambiguous problems. Combining research, systems thinking, and prototyping to move from insight to action. These approaches are not rigid frameworks, but adaptable tools that shift depending on the context, constraints, and people involved.
My process blends divergent and convergent thinking: exploring broadly to uncover opportunities, then focusing to define, test, and refine solutions. Whether working independently or leading collaborative sessions, I prioritize co-creation, bringing stakeholders into the process to build alignment, surface different perspectives, and create shared ownership of outcomes.
Alongside my industry work, more than a decade of university lecturing has deeply shaped how I approach design. As an instructor in senior-level product design studios, I focus on human-centered design, ethics, and research-driven product development. I help students transition from solely makers, to strategic decision-makers. I’ve also integrated frameworks like the UN Sustainable Development Goals into coursework to help frame complex challenges and open up diverse directions for exploration which you can read about here.
I founded and led a Design for Health course that connects students across design, engineering, and medicine with clinical partners and patient access. This course emphasizes the importance of engaging directly with people, not just data. My teaching experience has strengthened my ability to mentor, communicate complex ideas clearly, and facilitate thoughtful, outcome-driven collaboration grounded in real-world context.
Across projects, I draw on a mix of techniques including behavioral mapping, scenario building, analog and digital sketching, and both synchronous and asynchronous design sprints. The goal is to make ideas tangible early, learn quickly, and iterate with intention.
At its core, my approach is about turning complexity into clarity - creating the conditions for meaningful ideas to emerge and move forward.
Understanding Patients as People
Quantitative data is essential, but pairing it with story-rich, lived experiences reveals deeper opportunities for innovation. But what happens when the people you need to learn from don’t have the energy to participate in traditional research methods?
To better understand patients undergoing cancer treatment, I created cultural probe kits with colleagues Gabriela Constantinescu, Molly McMahon and Chris Brodt. Once recruited, we treated each participant's kit like a gift. Each kit included a disposable camera and guided journals with prompts and activities, allowing participants to share their experiences on their own time, in their own space.
This approach uncovered key themes, including rich details around schedules, fatigue and difficulty concentrating. This informed a simpler, more supportive app experience for Mobili-T.
Considerations like progressive disclosure were introduced to reduce cognitive load by presenting information step-by-step in easy to understand language, with supporting visuals and narration. The published research in the University of Alberta Health Sciences Journal can be read here.
Cultural Probes are designed to understand circumstances that quantitative data or interviews might miss.
Frameworks are guides, not rules.
I use a flexible design framework to align teams, ground decisions in research, and move ideas from concept to validated solutions through prototyping and real-world testing.
01. Discover
Uncover unmet needs through methods suchs as user and stakeholder interviews, usability testing, and secondary research. Ground insights in real-world contexts to understand behaviors, motivations, and constraints within complex, regulated environments.
02. Ideate
Translate insights and potential opportunities into idea generating activities such as design sprints, storyboarding, and concept development. Explore multiple directions quickly, balancing user needs, technical feasibility, and business viability.
03. Prototype
Bring ideas to life through rapid, iterative prototyping across software and hardware. Use participatory approaches to co-create with customers and stakeholders, refining concepts through hands-on exploration.
04. Validate
Test and refine solutions through real-world feedback, measuring usability, adherence, and outcomes with cross-functional teams to ensure solutions are effective, scalable, and ready for implementation.
Low-fidelity concepts were shared through animations and narrated videos, exploring a range of biofeedback approaches
Ideation, Interviews and Visual Biofeedback
During Ideation for Mobili-T, we interviewed people with head and neck cancer with two goals in mind, both focused on creating swallowing therapy that’s engaging and easy to use.
First, we wanted to understand what helps (or prevents) patients from sticking with therapy at home.
Second, we gathered feedback on early designs for the app’s visual biofeedback. This was critical, as real-time feedback is what patients rely on to know they’re completing exercises correctly when a clinician isn’t present. These visuals ranged from ECG-like signal lines, to playful interactions like a character jumping over obstacles with each swallow, to cityscapes being created by the patient's muscle activity.
You can read more about the design of the Mobili-T app here.
And the published findings can be read here.
Critique is a skill. One that improves with practice.
Critique acts as a bridge through the phases of discovery, ideation, prototyping and validation. Critique is a focused conversation about how well a design responds to the goals and principles it set out to address.
Simply asking “What do you think?” rarely leads to meaningful feedback. Strong critique is built on better questions: What problem is being solved? How is the solution addressing it? How effective is that approach, and why? What’s missing, unresolved, or creating new challenges?
At its best, critique shifts the conversation from opinion to insight, helping teams evaluate intent, surface gaps, and move work forward with clarity.
Good critique, however, doesn’t happen by accident. It requires the right conditions: a shared understanding of purpose, active listening, thoughtful participation, and a willingness to challenge ideas constructively. Being specific matters.
Through years of facilitating critiques as both a designer and educator, I’ve learned that the value isn’t just in the feedback itself, but in creating the space for better conversations - ones that push ideas further, strengthen decision-making, and ultimately lead to more thoughtful outcomes. Incorporating structured critiques into activities such as design sprints improves concept evaluation.
Turning ideas into decisions.
Originally developed by Jake Knapp at Google Ventures, the design sprint is a structured way to move from ambiguity to action. At its core, it’s about focusing time, aligning teams, and rapidly exploring solutions through making and testing.
While often associated with a five-day format, I’ve adapted sprints across a range of contexts, running them in-person and remotely, synchronously and asynchronously, and at different stages of the design process. Whether used as a low-fidelity deep dive or a stepping stone toward higher-fidelity prototypes, the goal remains the same: create clarity and momentum.
The example shown here are from the development of Mobili-T (in-person) and Breth (remote), where I led a series of design sprints to translate research into direction. This included synthesizing insights, evaluating analogous solutions through business model canvases, defining criteria aligned with the company’s vision, and framing key design questions. From there, we moved into structured ideation, using storyboards, heatmapping, and decision matrices to evaluate concepts and converge on clear opportunities that were developed into a series of testable prototypes.
Interviews are about understanding people.
At the earliest stages of design, the quality of what you learn depends on the questions you ask. Principles like Dieter Rams’ ten principles for good design provide a strong foundation to remind us to think critically about purpose, usefulness, and clarity before solutions take shape. From there, interviews become a way to explore how those principles might live in the real world.
Drawing from approaches like the Stanford d.school’s Empathy Fieldguide and Rob Fitzpatrick’s The Mom Test, I structure interviews to evoke stories, not opinions. That means avoiding leading questions, steering clear of vague prompts like “usually…,” and eliminating double-barrelled questions that create confusion. Instead, the focus is on specific moments, real behaviours, and lived experiences.
The goal isn’t to confirm assumptions, it’s to uncover motivations, patterns, and tensions that aren’t immediately visible.
It’s also important to recognize that anecdote is not data. Stories reflect an individual’s perception of their experience, which may or may not be widely shared. But within those stories are signals; insights that can’t be captured through metrics alone.
By synthesizing interviews into tools like empathy maps, we begin to make sense of complexity - translating raw conversations into structured, shareable insights. This process creates alignment, reveals opportunity, and helps teams move forward with a deeper understanding of the people they’re designing for.
Empathy map from the Breth design process, synthesizing interview insights into patterns across what users say, do, think, and feel.
Empathy maps turn conversations into insights.
People are complex and what they say, do, think, and feel doesn't always align. Empathy mapping helps make sense of this by organizing insights into four lenses: Says, Does, Thinks, and Feels.
The example shown here is from the design process for Breth, where I conducted a series of interviews with people representing the target customer segment. Empathy mapping helped navigate and group key insights from those conversations.
The goal isn’t perfect categorization. Overlap is expected, and gaps are often the most valuable signal, pointing to where deeper research is needed.
By structuring qualitative insights, empathy maps help teams move from scattered observations to shared understanding, creating clarity, alignment, and a stronger foundation for design decisions.
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