<p>I joined Fluid as an Information Designer in September 2000 and am now the Director of Interaction Design &amp; Usability. While at Fluid I created and implemented our Integrated Usability program and have been leading our efforts at developing more efficient processes, design methods, and design documents for information and interaction design.</p>
<p>Prior to joining Fluid I was a professor of Psychology at Xavier University of Louisiana. As an applied psychologist, my focus has always been very pragmatic: take theory and research and apply it in practical, useful ways in real-world settings. I started my psychology career in mathematical modeling of human communication behavior (using non-linear dynamic models and chaos theory), but I gravitated toward applied cognitive science in the mid-1990s after the appearance of the World Wide Web. My first information design efforts were in online curriculum design, but I quickly became interested in how people process information in digital environments - how do we perceive, process, understand, and remember information, and what enages us to interact with and manipulate it?</p>
<p>When I moved to San Francisco in 1999 to join the Internet boom (bubble?) I did not leave academia behind. Although I no longer teach as a full-time professor, I have adjunct faculty appointments at Golden Gate University, San Francisco State University, and the University of San Francisco. I am also very involved with the information and interaction design communities as well as the Adobe Fireworks communities, and I often present on information and interaction design and interactive prototyping at conferences and seminars.</p>

<p>I am driven by:</p>
<ul>
<li>Aesthetics and elegance<br /></li>
<li>Simplicity vs. complexity</li>
<li>Human motivation (and personality and emotion and memory and...)</li>
<li>Self-evident interaction design</li>
</ul>
<p>I am also interested in:</p>
<ul>
<li>Information visualization and data graphics</li>
<li>Statistics</li>
<li>Motorcycles</li>
<li>Macro photography</li>
<li>Travel</li>
<li>Cooking, food, and wine</li>
</ul>