Now
WhatI'mdoingatthisexactmomentintime.
A living page. I update this when something shifts, a new book, a new tool, a new obsession. If you're reading this in a few months, it might look different.
Current focus
Work
Moderating conversational-AI and voice research at Apple. Deep in the details of how people actually talk to AI, the pauses, the repairs, the trust signals.
Side project
Researching AI governance and the Indigenous Data Sovereignty movement, the frameworks that assert community ownership, consent, and control over how data is used. Thinking about what these models offer everyone navigating digital rights today.
Current research
AI governance & Indigenous data sovereignty.
As AI becomes the fastest-growing open-source technology, questions of who owns data, and who gets to decide how it is used, have never been more urgent. I am currently exploring the Indigenous Data Sovereignty movement and the frameworks that have emerged from it: principles that assert community ownership, consent, and control over both material and digital data.
Researchers like Shoshana Zuboff have described the broader systemic problem as "surveillance capitalism", the extraction of human experience as raw material for predictive products. Indigenous communities have been fighting versions of this problem for decades, and have developed sophisticated frameworks that acknowledge data sources as human, deserving not only co-ownership but the power to govern how their data is used.
These frameworks are not only relevant to Indigenous peoples. They are case studies for everyone whose family photos, genetic data, and personal identity are now entering the discourse of digital rights and personal security.
Why this matters to UX research
Researchers who understand data governance frameworks bring something most UX practitioners don't: a structural lens on who research serves, who it extracts from, and how consent is designed. This shapes how I think about participant ethics, study design, and the communities I research with.
References
Adams, M.M. (2024). Indigenous Fire Data Sovereignty: Applying Indigenous Data Sovereignty Principles to Fire Research. Fire, 7, 222.
Reading
Books that are shaping my thinking.
Just Research
by Erika Hall
A quiet manifesto for research as a practice, not a phase.
Conversational Design
by Erika Hall
Re-reading for how language shapes interface trust.
The Design of Everyday Things
by Don Norman
Always on my desk. A reminder that affordances are ethical.
Raciolinguistics
by H. Samy Alim et al.
Connecting language, identity, and power, directly relevant to how I think about inclusive AI.
A Woman Makes a Plan
by Maye Musk
On building a career across decades and disciplines, a reminder that reinvention is a method.
Learning
Skills in progress.
Voice UX research methods
Expanding from screen-based moderation to ambient, multi-turn voice interactions.
Conversation design for AI
Deepening prompt and dialogue design for human-AI interaction.
Tools
The stack.
Previous research
Case studies and prior work.
Why research
Real innovation whispers from the margins. So I build studies that surface what people actually mean, not just what they say.