About

My name is an accident in phonetics

In Hebrew, Natan means “gift from God.” In Mandarin, it sounds like 拿蛋 (ná dàn) “hold an egg.” In Tamil, it means “ruler” or “dancer,” depending on the diacritics. This isn’t a party trick; it’s actually the perfect metaphor for what I do. Design that works in São Paulo fails in Shanghai. What’s intuitive in Bangalore confuses users in Amsterdam. I’ve spent twenty years learning that the best global products aren’t designed for everyone, they’re designed with everyone, one uncomfortable cultural translation at a time.

Unconventional does the trick

I’ve spent nearly a decade figuring out how to make design work across cultures, budgets, and the kind of constraints that would send conventional designers straight to self-medication. I’ve learned that the best solutions rarely come from unlimited resources. They come from resourcefulness and a slightly unhealthy amount of stubbornness.

Here’s what that actually means: I help teams make better decisions faster, without the corporate fluff. I focus on understanding why users behave differently across regions and designing for those differences, not pretending they don’t exist. I build UX systems that disappear into the background. Think infrastructure, but make it invisible.

My background isn’t typical. Growing up in Argentina, I learned design the hard way. No fancy software subscriptions, no budget for the “right” tools, just resourcefulness and the beautiful grind of figuring it out. Turns out, that scrappy make-it-work mentality is exactly what we need in the AI era. Who knew? The trick is to find unconventional ways to design conventional experiences.

Lately I coach people on startups, UX, product and design on ADPList. I wrote a book: The Augmented Designer because designers kept asking me if AI was going to replace them, and I got tired of having the same conversation 47 times a week.

Let’s Talk If you’re navigating AI anxiety, building products across cultures, or trying to explain to your stakeholders why context actually matters, drop me a line. I promise not to suggest blockchain as a solution. Or tell you to just “make it pop.”