Hi, I'm
Brooke

UX Design isn’t the solution,
it's just a small part of my equation.

For most of my life, I’ve been trying to understand what passion really looks like. I’ve always admired people who seem to light up when they talk about the thing they love, the musicians, the athletes, the creators who lose track of time because they’re so immersed. I used to wonder why I didn’t feel that same obvious pull toward one single thing.

As a kid, I was less focused on finding my own passion and more focused on understanding everyone else’s. What made them care so much? How did they know? That curiosity followed me into adulthood.

I’ve had more jobs than I can easily count and changed majors many times before earning my MS in User Experience. I’ve run corn mill operations, filleted fish in Alaska, and tried just about every hobby that caught my attention. From the outside, it probably looks like I couldn’t make up my mind. In reality, I was following whatever sparked my interest at the time. I enjoyed a lot of those experiences, but nothing felt like the one thing I couldn’t stop doing.

In my mind, I always refer back to my brother. Unlike myself, school didn’t come easy to him growing up, but he had a thing for music. It didn’t mean he was incredible at it, he wasn’t in a band or anything. What mattered was that he thoroughly enjoyed it. To this day he still plays a myriad of instruments in his free time, and he’s pretty good at it. He told me once, that he just finds himself doing it. Almost like an impulse without pressure, he just plays.

What he said stuck with me.

When I look at my own patterns, I’ve realized something, my constant has always been curiosity. I may not stick with every hobby, but I always find myself learning. Reading. Researching. Asking questions. Pulling things apart to understand how they work—whether that’s systems, behaviors, recipes, routines, or people. I genuinely enjoy gathering information and figuring out what it means. Every new insight feels like progress toward understanding something a little more deeply.

That's where design comes in.

Design itself isn’t the passion, it’s the outlet. It gives structure to the thing I’ve always done naturally. The design process starts with a problem, and solving it requires research, empathy, pattern recognition, and critical thinking. It asks me to understand people, what they need, what frustrates them, what motivates them, and translate that understanding into something tangible and useful.

It’s the combination that feels right, curiosity paired with purpose. Research paired with creation. Analysis paired with empathy.

I don’t think passion, for me, looks like a lightning bolt. It looks like a steady pull toward learning, understanding, and improving things. Design just happens to be the perfect place to channel that.

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

– Albert Einstein