# Zen Lara — Designer, Researcher, Strategist
> https://apapacho.work

## About
Zen Lara makes complex systems legible — for the teams building them, the people using them, and the agents operating them. Deep roots in design systems, facilitation, and research, applied across enterprise ecosystems, hyper-growth startups, and solo products. Practice areas, in the order Zen leads with: Facilitation (lead discipline — culture work through the Zen Design Labs consulting practice), Service Design, Design Systems, UX & Product Design, and Data Visualization. That practice extends to agentic workflows and the sovereign, self-hosted infrastructure they run on. Full case studies live under https://apapacho.work/work/.

## Case Studies
- [Starchart](https://apapacho.work/work/starchart): End-to-end product design — service design, data visualization, design systems, and full UX — built solo from scratch and in active daily use with real clients. (2026–present.)
- [Delta at AKQA](https://apapacho.work/work/delta): Three years across the full digital ecosystem of a Fortune 500 travel brand — responsive web, account experience, a cross-brand design system, and omnichannel infrastructure, told in four chapters. (2018–2021.)
- [Delta · Accessible Travel Services](https://apapacho.work/work/delta-accessible-travel): How language, systems, and assumptions shape the experience of disabled air travelers — and what it takes to surface the patterns that make individual fixes actually stick. (2019–2020.)
- [Calendly](https://apapacho.work/work/calendly): A design systems practice built from scratch inside a hyper-growth startup during the remote work revolution — no dedicated PM, high turnover, and a product growing faster than documentation could follow. (2021–2023.)
- [Harvard × Superfriendly](https://apapacho.work/work/harvard): The Harvard Business School Digital Initiative didn't want a workshop. They wanted a durable way of working that would keep inclusive design alive after the engagement ended — when no outside facilitator was in the room. (2023.)
- [Chick-fil-A Evergreen · AKQA](https://apapacho.work/work/chickfila): An illustrated interactive map microsite for a holiday campaign — built and shipped during the first pandemic holiday season. Warm, place-rooted, handcrafted. (2020.)
- [Intuit](https://apapacho.work/work/intuit): I governed the enterprise DAM platform and compliance infrastructure for Intuit's Mailchimp marketing organization — a scope that grew to Quickbooks and Credit Karma when Wink became Team Intuition, under the regulatory standards applied to Intuit's financial products. (Wink → Team Intuition.)
- [Methodology](https://apapacho.work/work/listening-tour): A methodology essay in human systems research — how structured listening surfaces the patterns that conventional user research misses. (Applied 2019–2026.)

## Process
1. Frame the system — map actors, workflows, constraints, edge cases, and success criteria before narrowing into screens.
2. Ground it in evidence — interviews, usability studies, artifact audits, journey maps, domain research.
3. Make decisions visible — flows, prototypes, principles, taxonomies, service blueprints, reusable patterns.
4. Scale the pattern — document the why, contribute to the system, create governance so teams can apply decisions independently.

## Systems & Agents
- Agentic workflows: multi-agent pipelines for research synthesis, ops automation, content generation, and an end-to-end job-search system with scoring logic and structured data contracts. Design-systems governance thinking applied to agents: clear contracts, documented decisions, systems that work without a person in the room.
- Self-hosted infrastructure: self-hosted publishing (Ghost), data migrations, and automation on personal infrastructure. Orientation: building intimate, sovereign digital spaces — the era of abundant software is all about the homemade; software that feels like entering a friend's living room.
- This site is built agent-first: semantic HTML, JSON-LD structured data, this llms.txt, and an on-site assistant (zen.ai) scoped to Zen's work.

## Tools
- Design: Figma (a decade deep — libraries, multi-brand theming, training programs); previously Sketch, including a studio-wide Sketch → Figma migration.
- AI-native design tools: Paper (paper.design), Pencil (pencil.dev), Agentation (agentation.com), and the Figma MCP server for wiring design files into agent workflows.
- Facilitated workshops: Miro, FigJam, and self-hosted Affine; Loom and Slack for async-first rituals.
- Prototyping & agents: Claude Code and Cursor.

## Writing
- [pro-human output ceilings](https://apapacho.work/writing/pro-human-output-ceilings): I have been a tech worker for most of my working life. I started intuiting early that designing systems to free us from grudge work would reclaim time for the parts I actually… (2026-06-02)
- [config is coming](https://apapacho.work/writing/config-is-coming): Config is coming again I think it was Config 2024 when I first had the feeling “Oh shit. Stuff is going to move faster than people can learn it”. I organized the first few Figma… (2026-05-16)
- [Hungry Ghosts](https://apapacho.work/writing/hungry-ghosts): Tiny throat. Giant mouth. I haven't actually read recently whether the Buddhist story talks about giant mouths and tiny throats or what, but I have changed my hungry ghosts to be… (2026-05-15)
- [Somatics & Design Intuition  Resource List](https://apapacho.work/writing/somatics-design-talk-resource-list): This post is meant as an adjunct to a talk I did July 18, 2024 with Ladies that UX in Atlanta. The talk was an introduction to somatic practices and an invitation into somatics as… (2024-07-18)

## Contact
- Email: hello@zenlabs.design
- Book a 30-minute project call: https://cal.zendesignlabs.work/zenlara/30min?overlayCalendar=true&layout=month_view
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/zenlara
- Consulting practice: https://zendesignlabs.com
- Disciplines overview: https://apapacho.work/disciplines
- Ask the on-site assistant: https://apapacho.work/?chat=open