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I've spent more than fifteen years working inside some of the most data-rich organizations in the world — hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, global enterprises, higher education, government agencies — and the thing I keep finding is this: the data is usually good. The people working with it are smart, dedicated, and genuinely trying to do right by the people they serve. What's missing, more often than not, is the bridge between what the data knows and what the person holding it can actually do with it.
I came to this work from an unusual angle. My background is in design — graphic design, information design, user experience — and I spent over a decade teaching it, researching it, and writing about it before I moved into consulting. That combination turned out to matter enormously. Design gave me the tools to think about how information is received, not just produced. Teaching gave me a deep respect for the gap between what an expert understands and what a newcomer can grasp. And research — peer-reviewed, rigorous, unglamorous research — gave me the habit of asking why something works before assuming that it does.
What I do now draws on all of it. I work with organizations to design the human experience of data: what it looks like, how it's explained, who it's actually built for, and whether the person at the end of it can understand, trust, and act on what it's telling them. I've published two books — Information Design for the Common Good (Bloomsbury, 2021) and the forthcoming Data Humanism in Practice (Routledge, 2026). I've presented at more than twenty national and international conferences. I currently lead the Global Data Experience practice at Slalom Consulting, where I work with clients including BCG, Mass General Brigham, Bristol Myers Squibb, Nike, UCLA Health, Johnson & Johnson, and Google.
But the credential that matters most to me isn't on the resume. It's the pattern I've seen repeat across all of those contexts — from a clinical team that stopped trusting their own dashboards, to an AI system being deployed at scale with nobody having asked the most important question: what happens when a real person encounters this, in a real moment, under real pressure? In every case, the opportunity wasn't technical. It was human. Someone needed to look at the full picture — the people, the processes, the incentives, the governance, the moments of decision scattered throughout — and design the marks that help everyone navigate forward.
That's what Segnara Studio is built to do. Not making data simpler. Making it honest — honest about who it's for, what they actually need, and what it takes to design an experience they can genuinely use.
Where Segnara comes from
Segnara is built from segnare — an Italian verb meaning to mark: to place a sign, to make something visible, to leave a trace for the person who follows. It's also, as I discovered, a real place.
Val Segnara is a mountain valley in the northern Italian Alps — a remote, protected corridor in Piedmont that can only be navigated by a marked trail. The trail has three sections, named Water, Sky, and Land. Without the marks, the valley is impassable. With them, anyone can find the way through.
That image has stayed with me since I first encountered it. It's the most precise description I've found of what I actually do. The marks don't create the terrain — the complexity was always there. They don't make the path shorter. They make it navigable. And they were placed by someone who had already walked the difficult route, and who cared enough about the stranger who would follow to stop and make the way clearer.
That's the practice. I've already walked the hard path — in hospitals, boardrooms, research labs, government agencies, and classrooms. Segnara Studio is the mark I'm leaving: the frameworks, the methods, and the design work that help other organizations find their own way through.
The name also carries something personal. I'm Italian-Canadian, and I've long been drawn to the inukshuk — the stone figures built by Inuit peoples across the Canadian Arctic at the exact points where navigation becomes uncertain. Each stone supports the one above it. Each mark is a gift, placed for someone the builder may never meet. It's the same gesture as the trail in Val Segnara. Different terrain, same intention: someone was here, they found a way, and they left a sign so you can too.
What's coming: Segnara Labs
Segnara Studio is where the work happens with clients. Segnara Labs is where the work goes deeper — and wider.
Coming soon, Segnara Labs will be the research and community arm of the practice: the place where the frameworks developed in client work are published, tested, and made available to a broader audience. Where workshops move beyond the boardroom and into communities, classrooms, and civic institutions. Where the question what does it take to design data experiences that respect the people who depend on them? gets asked not just by consultants and executives, but by teachers, public health workers, community advocates, and anyone else who works with data and the people it affects.
The early vision for Segnara Labs includes open framework resources, community workshop programming, and the Empathy Engineers — a children's book series that introduces young readers to the idea that data is always about people, and that understanding it is a form of care.
The details are still being placed. But the direction is clear: the marks that Segnara Studio places in enterprise settings belong in the wider world too. Segnara Labs is how they get there.
