By way of brief personal introduction, I will begin by saying this: I’m glad to be home! My wife and I were just in India for the past two weeks, which was an amazing experience, but we are nonetheless tired and thankful for clean sheets and clean air. So forgive me for being relatively absent the first week and for getting over my mega jet-lag for the next few days. (it’s something like an 11-hour time difference!)

I live in New Haven, Connecticut, am married to a wonderful wife named Kelly and we have a mini american eskimo named Wimble who is crazy and very lovable. My undergraduate degrees were in Architecture (b. arch) and english (minor, creative writing) from Penn State University. I’ve worked at Pickard Chilton for the last 4 1/2 years as an architectural designer, and for the last year or so have been transitioning within the firm to managing many of our graphic design endeavors (like publications, exhibitions, etc.). It’s been fun. I love living in a college town, and my wife and I enjoy the charm of New England when we have the time to explore. You can find some of my personal design work here if you like – though regrettably I have some awesome stuff to post that’s not yet been photographed (sometime soon!).

My experience designing in virtual and/or interactive environments is extremely limited – so I’m rather intimidated by this course! I resonate deeply with the theoretical side of UX since it’s in line with how I like to think about design (coming from an architectural background into graphic design has provided a thrust towards thinking about UX more than I had predicted), but have had little experience on the practical end. I’ve designed a few websites, but have always had friends do the actual code work for what I’ve cooked up visually. I like to think that exhibition design has a lot of overlap, at least in theory, as does book design, and those two areas I’ve done a good bit of work. So I have a lot to learn – please humor me as I will probably be asking a lot of questions and maybe lagging behind a bit. Looking forward to learning with you all.

Justin