Erik Michielsen: What inspires you to work at the intersection of design and psychology?

Hammans Stallings: you know, the ability of psychology to sort of -- to, say make people's lives more meaningful, more interesting and -- and just make products and services more usable I think is a -- for me, just a -- it's an intrinsic motivator that is a -- that's -- that is, you know, the destination, I mean as a journey. So, when I was coming out of graduate school, I was very interested in finding a place to work where I could unfairly utilize all the passion I had from particular aspects of my background and I -- I realized that marketing was only kind of -- gonna get me half way there in that designers cared a lot more about the field of psychology whether they realize it or not. I didn't really know at the time. But I would say that recognizing that there's this field called "design" where these ideas of, you know, psychology could live on both in doing assessments of people, usability, human factors, but also in -- in creating new experiences and devices that are -- are human and people can relate to. It meant that I could be a psychologist and have an impact at a leveraged point. So if you think about, we're creating artifacts, we're creating interfaces for people into the future. That's a place where you can have disproportionate impact on the world, whereas, if I were working at a -- as a classically trained psychoanalyst or something, I'm working with one person, so I'd say working in design, I get to make a really big impact as a psychologist.