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Over the past fifteen years, I've worked within some of the world’s most data-rich organizations, including hospitals, pharmaceutical firms, global companies, higher education institutions, and government agencies. Throughout this time, I've observed a common issue: data is often managed separately from the people who need and use it most. Usually, what’s lacking is a bridge that connects the insights the data provides to the actions the individual can take.
I came to this work from an unusual angle. My background is in design: graphic design, information design, and user experience, and I spent over a decade teaching it, researching it, and writing about it before I moved into consulting. That combination mattered 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 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 built for, and whether the person at the end 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 (Segnara Press, 2026). I've presented at more than twenty national and international conferences. After founding The Agency at Quinnipiac University, giving students the opportunity to work with real clients, I went on to lead the Global Data Experience practice at Slalom Consulting for over five years.
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, including the people, the processes, the incentives, the governance, and the moments of decision scattered throughout. Only then can the path forward be designed to help everyone navigate.
That's what Segnara Studio is built to do. Not making data simpler. Making it 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; it's the most precise expression of my work. The marks don't create the terrain or make the path shorter — they make it navigable. Someone placed them after walking the difficult route and caring enough to 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: frameworks, methods, and design work that help other organizations find their own way through.
What's coming: Segnara Labs
If Segnara Studio is where the work happens with clients, Segnara Labs is where it extends to local communities and educational programming.
Coming soon, Segnara Labs will be 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 by teachers, public health workers, community advocates, and anyone else who works with data and the people they 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.
More details to come, but the direction is clear: the marks that Segnara Studio places in enterprise settings belong in the wider world too.
