Hi! I’m Maxine ✌️,

I strive to design with empathy and kindness.

I first got into design when I realized that there was a middle ground between artistic collaboration and helping people. After graduating with a bachelor’s in psychology, helping others was always something I wanted to do. While therapy seemed like a good path at that time, I wasn’t comfortable with the rigidity provided by the profession. I wanted to help people by connecting, listening, and brainstorming, as a team and not working in silo.

For me, helping people meant collaborating and letting those that you are helping speak for themselves, and that’s why I value user research. No solution is perfect, but working together and iterating on your design process lends directly to creating a better solution. This is why teamwork is my jam and reworking problems is the game.

Curious by nature and curiously out of place, I grew up in Finland and taught myself to be fluently trilingual so that I could talk to everyone - human or dog. All joking aside, I really enjoy playing video games especially after building my first PC, and my latest obsession is Apex Legends (currently hard-stuck Plat 4 - pls send help)! But my biggest passion has always been animals. Around the end of August 2020, I started fostering dogs with my partner and our dog Junior. Since then, we have fostered 5 dogs from Oaxaca to Texas to Nunavut - and I can honestly say it has been one of the most fulfilling and incredible experiences of my life. Currently, we’re on a break from fostering because of a new addition to the family - in the form of a 7-pound, 12 years old sweet and sassy senior cat - that we adopted a couple of months ago!

But enough about me, let’s get to know you.