About FarmCat
FarmCat Design is inspired by our family cat, Mika. A Diluted Calico, she was rescued from a shelter in 2018. Confident, assertive, and avoidant, she forsakes all others for her one true love – a brown mouse toy named “Mickey”.
When not batting Mickey around, she window-stalks wild beasts, sleeps, and endures sudden hugs from restless children. Mika is not fond of human touch, but she’s becoming more tolerant. Her tail is a great indicator of her patience, as it will whip more quickly when she’s had her limit.
Those who recognize her boundaries and qualities experience a wonderful relationship with her. Poking and prodding children do not. Unrelenting tormenters unleash Mika’s inner tiger, forcing them to flee. Mika engages far beyond her weight class and is undefeated in these contests.
When the barn is quiet, and the beasts are resting, Mika becomes a serviceable lap cat amenable to head scratches or calm petting. On occasion, she’ll provide gentle licks, grooming us or testing how we might taste. Regardless, we enjoy her for who she is, a beautiful FarmCat, doing her best to survive the subtle savages of suburbia.
About the Author
My design career started in the mid-90’s while working for Hewlett-Packard. Substantial research into Ergonomics and Human Factors Engineering landed me a job as an Ergonomic Technician within the Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) department.
The EHS Department had a goal where all division employees would receive an ergonomic assessment by a certain date. For some reason I thought a web-based self-assessment tool could help, so I purchased the book “HTML for Dummies” and got started. After creating the assessment questions, logic, and solution options, the department found an IT resource to build the back-end scripts necessary for processing. The department met its goal on time.
Time passed and I moved to another position. Soon, I faced another challenge. An integrated call center system resulted in more employee injuries. These injuries could not be prevented by simple changes as they were “baked into” equipment and work design. After watching several employees become seriously injured during the course of their work, with little hope for remedy, I left the company to attend graduate school to learn how to design better systems.
Since completing my graduate degree, I’ve had the opportunity to apply human-centered design within a wide variety of products and systems including Manufacturing, Vehicles, Point-of-Sale workstations, e-Commerce, and Enterprise Software systems. Each of these opportunities had challenging usability issues to solve, and I’m grateful for those experiences.
When I’m not designing work systems, I’m raising a family, managing clutter, or fixing things that break or wear out. Such is adult life. My hobbies include riding my bike, reading, listening to audio books, and trim carpentry.