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I’m a design leader with 15+ years of design experience at the intersection of technology, social context and systems. I have partnered with founders at startups and execs at enterprises looking to enact paradigm change and scale. I have being the sole-designer and have also scaled teams to 10+. I operate across several latitudes, helping move work from a scrappy prototype to an executive-level spotlight.

I teach my teams to leverage design thinking mindsets while practicing a scientific process: be creative, bold, adaptable, experiment, try, fail, try again, observe, prove. Above all else: absolutist thinking is the killer of innovation. Have strong vision and be eager to experiment along the way.

I saw this firsthand inside Walmart's innovation arm, where our teams hyper-focused on the most critical problems for busy parents. We experimented with technology that allowed for natural speech in moments where people only had a few seconds, instead of forcing them into an app experience that didn’t match that reality. As a result, we created an experience that enabled a more natural behavior that led to a significant business impact.

My design approach shapes how technology can be integrated into real, lived conditions, particularly communities that are often excluded or misrepresented in mainstream product development. I put a strong focus on designing for specific contexts, steering clear of generalization where complexity is often erased due to abstraction. This can sit in tension with popular systems, processes or best practices where the simplification that enables scale can erase the nuances of real lived human experiences. These systems tend to operate in extractive ways, reducing reality to a series of inputs.

Those tensions led me to build Contexto, an independent bookshop and cultural space. It brings together publishing, craft and community-based practices to counter extractive models. Its focus is on participation, continuity and the preservation of knowledge grounded in practice, place and lineage. It questions the idea of scale and hypothesizes that sustainability can exist without extraction and instead can be successful by leveraging lessons from our past.

Alongside this, Hyphae is my [new] independent design practice, where I collaborate with organizations and individuals working toward more regenerative futures. The work focuses on supporting systems, products and forms of organization that move away from extraction and toward approaches grounded in lived conditions, ecological awareness and collective responsibility.

I’m Yannell

Summary of Work
I have led design, ux and creative teams or have been the sole designer in building tools to support busy parents managing the cognitive load of caregiving, improving access to essential medical equipment like oxygen for patients navigating insurance systems, and helping households make more sustainable, cost-effective choices around food. The work has consistently centered on specificity, where the impact of design is immediate and lived.

I’ve done this across both large-scale organizations and early-stage companies, including work at Walmart and venture-backed startups.