One of the greatest joys of my photography career has been to meet and document the lives of an incredible variety of people. During my tenure as a staff photographer for a suburban Chicago newspaper, I created a project to document downtown Joliet, IL. The industrial city, located in the Southwest suburbs of Chicago was struggling to revive its historic downtown, as newer parts of the city expanded under a large housing boom. My goal was to show the value of a downtown area, where a diverse population of people worked together. Each week over the course of a year I would interview and photograph a subject who lived or worked in this area.

As a person who grew up in a similar town, and whose family owned a business, I found myself having a lot of empathy for the people who lived in this area. This empathy drove the success of the project, as many of the paper’s readers could identify with the struggles they saw in the images. The project was published weekly over the course of a year.

I believe a great UX designer is driven to understand the circumstances of others, and through that, develops successful solutions.