Who is Caden D?
A crash course to all things Caden Damiano
I learned to ski when I was two years old.
Ever since then, up until I was a poor college student with the lack of funds to support such a lifestyle, I skied every year at Park City Mountain Resort. It was the first sport I was involved in, and I was pretty good at it. My parents and I where a small family a three living in a condo in Park City, Utah.
The thing that resonates with me about skiing is the individual nature of the sport. I like individual sports the best, because when I am interested in something, I will fully immerse myself into it, which is hard in a team environment when people don’t care as much as you do. You get these ideas how things could go and you imagine in your sleep how to perform better.
Obsession kind of defines how I approach things. In sports, school, and martial arts, I always put the extra work in because of my curiosity towards the smallest details. Especially during my training for Brazilian Jiujitsu competitions I would always study the leverage points and perfect my technique so I could perform at my very best.
This led to a few key hobbies that shaped my interest in design. My mother is a interior designer who designed multi million dollar second homes in Park City, and I was filming and editing in final cut pro in my early teens. The combination of shadowing my mother at her jobs and learning how to evoke emotion through film thought me early that you can design things visually, through timing and specially to illicit a desired effect.
This led to me making videos in high school and getting a local following. My teachers would play what I made in class and it gave me some street credit when I wanted to get help with more videos. Looking back I know they could have been better, but it was a major confidence booster in my career trajectory. I wanted to “make” cool things for a living. Specifically movies.
My english teacher taught me how to synthesize ideas. Which I think was the most valuable skill I have every learned. It made me fall in love with prose and writing. Design was in the prose, placed and timed to convey a life lesson. Because of that I wanted to major in english when I went to college.
Essentially I love to tell stories, and using prose and film you can better understand the human condition and the psychology of others. It allows you to generate heuristics about how things work and test your assumptions. Sometimes a joke falls flat, or the timing in a scene wasn’t timed correctly, but I learned that through feedback you could design an improved experience around that.
Before I go any further. I need to talk about how this ties into technology. I loved gadgets. I watched all the Apple product releases and when the iPhone 3G was released I saved up all my money to buy one. It was the coolest thing ever and I learned how to work every feature on that thing. I was in 8th grade. Early adopter big time. My dad didn’t even see the value in a smart phone at that time. Ever since then I always wondered if I could make cool things like that for a living. (That’s foreshadowing)
So I was a maker that loved to make videos, write and storyteller with big dreams of feature success. But then I put it all on hold for a volunteer service mission to California for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
The experience was the best thing I ever did. In high school I thought I knew what I wanted, but spending two years to work hard and think about my priorities really helped solidify what I wanted in life.
So I get home and go to college but this time I change my major from english to communications because I want to using storytelling in a more practical setting instead of pontificating the meaning of classic novels.
This is how I discover web development. A comm 101 class had me make a Wordpress.com website to start a blog. I didn’t like how I couldn’t customize it so I taught myself how to code.
Naturally, I got into the communities and learned about product design.
Around the same time I got married. I had a spouse that complimented me and made me want to be more. It also made me work harder to figure out whet I wanted to do in life.
In a long round about way found a UX Design program at Utah Valley University and I fell in love. It was the culmination of everything I enjoy. I got to do everything I liked to do. I still need to cut videos for landing pages and wrote copy for products, and I applied my coding knowledge to make great experiences. I used my synthesizing skills to gather insights from users and create a narrative that informed my design decisions. It was also the place where I learned to understand Human-Centered Design.
I’m currently interning at FamilySearch in Lehi, Utah. I am a part of a 23 person UX team.