Designer Statement

I’ve spent most of my working experience in places you wouldn’t normally find a designer; tourism marketing and business management consulting. Bringing this design mindset to a non-traditional environment has made for a multitude of exciting collaborations and allowed me to learn from wearing multiple hats at the same time.

During my time at the University of Washington I’ve been able to dive deeper in many areas of design. Through intense seminars and studios on design theory, scholarship, research and methods, I’ve spent a great amount of time refining hard skills while broadening my view of what design can achieve in the world.

My thesis work explores music listening data as a visual representation of self. Shelves of vinyl records and cassette tapes spark thoughts and memories at a quick glance. In the shift to digital formats, we lost physical artifacts but gained data as a rich, but often hidden artifact of our music listening. This project tracked and visualized the music listening habits of eight people over 30 days to explore how this data can serve as a visual representation of self and present new opportunities for reflection.

Visit Chad’s website

“In addition to his considerable design talents, Chad is smart, focused, highly organized, and calm in a crisis. These are all of the qualities faculty dream of not only for tackling a thesis, but for effectively TA’ing hundreds of freshmen struggling through Design Foundations. Chad has been very effective in both pursuits, and we will sorely miss him.”

– Kristine Matthews, Chair + Associate Professor of Visual Communication Design

Committee

• Kristine Matthews (Visual Communication Design)
• Karen Cheng (Visual Communication Design)
• Linda Norlen