Angela Read

Design Technologist

I have always dreamed of becoming an architect ever since I saw Fallingwater, a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I understood what design could do — how a building could feel inevitable, like it had always belonged to that hillside. That feeling stayed with me through a civil engineering program I left, an interior design degree I loved, graduate school in architecture, and study abroad programs in Florence and Copenhagen that changed how I see the world.

Architecture gave me everything I expected it to. Systems thinking. Spatial reasoning. The ability to hold a complex problem in my head and work through it carefully. What it gave me that I did not expect was a growing awareness that the work I cared most about kept moving further away as my career advanced.

I spent more time coordinating between teams and less time building things. And I noticed something: the moments that still lit me up were the ones closest to technology. How a website was structured. How a user moved through a product. What decisions sat behind every interaction on a screen.

I had always been curious about how computers worked. I just had not followed that curiosity yet.

Taking UX design courses gave it a framework. Learning to code made it real. HTML and CSS felt immediately natural, the same logic and attention to detail that architecture trained in me, just applied to a different medium. I am working through JavaScript now, and the deeper I go, the more certain I am that this is where I belong.

My graduate thesis has been cited seven times in published research and viewed by researchers across nearly 100 countries. That depth of focus is not something I learned. It is how I work. I bring it to UX research, to front-end development, and to my independent study of AI systems and privacy design.

I am not leaving design. I am following it somewhere new.