I’m Duncan. I connect dots across teams, culture, design, and technology to build systems that last.

For more than 30 years, my work has lived in the space between disciplines—where design meets engineering, where product intent meets organizational reality, and where good ideas either become durable systems or quietly fall apart. Most of that work has been in aerospace, defense, and government-adjacent environments, where constraints are real, failure is expensive, and the cost of getting it wrong shows up years later, not days.

I specialize in design systems and platform-level UX, but what I really work on is alignment: helping teams share a mental model, helping organizations scale without losing coherence, and helping technology evolve without breaking trust. Design systems fail far more often because of culture and communication than because of components or tokens—and that’s where I tend to focus.

I’m a systems thinker by nature. I spend a lot of time thinking about how things change over time: how teams grow, how platforms age, how decisions compound, and how small inconsistencies become big problems if they’re ignored. Colleagues have described working with me as “working with a crystal ball,” which usually means I’m asking questions about the next problem while we’re still solving the current one. At the same time, I’m comfortable getting my hands dirty—debugging, prototyping, writing, or unblocking work when momentum matters.

My background blends:

• Design craft and UX architecture
• Technical fluency with modern frontend systems
• Product and platform thinking
• A pragmatic, skeptical approach to AI and emerging tools—useful when they earn their place, ignored when they don’t

Earlier in my career, I co-authored Skip Intro: Flash Usability and Interface Design (endorsed by Alan Cooper), taught interface design at UC Irvine Extension, and worked across media, automotive, and enterprise software before moving deeper into regulated, high-stakes domains. More recently, I’ve led large-scale design systems used by thousands of developers, where stability, clarity, and long-term stewardship mattered more than novelty.

As a leader, I favor clarity of intent over control. I care deeply about building teams that feel trusted, capable, and motivated—and about creating cultures where good judgment is valued more than process theater. I believe the best systems are the ones that quietly enable people to do their best work without drawing attention to themselves.

I’m most energized by problems that:

• Span multiple teams or disciplines
• Require long-horizon thinking
• Demand both technical rigor and human understanding

If you care about systems that endure, teams that thrive, and design that earns its influence by being useful—not loud—we’re probably thinking about the same things.