I did not come to design from design.
I spent nineteen years studying how people build a sense of who they are and what it costs them to defend it. The visual part came last.
The psychology came first, by nineteen years.
I teach the psychology of identity, personality, and interpersonal difference at the University of Oklahoma, and I have written two books about how a self gets built and what it costs to protect one. I did not add psychology to a design practice as a differentiator. The order ran the other way around and took nineteen years to arrive at.
What I had been studying that whole time was how people recognize and defend a sense of who they are. It took me an embarrassingly long while to notice, long enough that several colleagues noticed first, that the recognition part of that question is very often visual, and that it happens faster than the reasons people give for it afterward. Most people can tell you within a second whether a room or a garment belongs to them. Almost none of them can tell you why.
The Instinct Aesthetic came out of that noticing. It went through an IRB-approved study at the University of Oklahoma, and it is now the basis of every engagement here. It is also why the work begins with a diagnosis rather than a brief, which some founders find clarifying and some find genuinely irritating. I have learned to treat the irritation as information.
I started painting in oils in 2024, badly for the first year, which has been a useful reminder of what it actually costs to make something.
- Position
- Associate professor of human relations, University of Oklahoma. Nineteen years.
- Degrees
- PhD, intercultural communication. Master of human relations, counseling and personality psychology.
- Books
- The Narcissist in You and Everyone Else, Rowman & Littlefield. Center of the Universe, Bloomsbury Academic. The Aesthetic Instinct, in development, represented by Laura Wood, Fine Print Literary Agency. All three books.
- Research
- The Instinct Aesthetic™, from an IRB-approved study at the University of Oklahoma, 2025 to 2026. See the research.
- Color
- Master color consultant, certified under Leatrice Eiseman of the Pantone Color Institute.
- Writing
- Creative Review · The Branding Journal · Psychology Today · Visual Grammar, on Substack. See the writing.
- Also
- Co-founder of Empathy Architects, a personality and Enneagram education practice, and co-founder of a ballet company.
Where I read a business, Aaron builds the thing that has to hold up.
Aaron oversees execution, client relations, and the production work that gives an identity coherence at the level of the artifact. The paper, the spacing, the register of a caption, and the several hundred small decisions that separate an identity capable of surviving contact with a real business from one that only photographs well.
Her background is in personality psychology and nonprofit management, and she co-authored the 2021 lexical analysis study that the instinct instrument came out of. She is also the reason engagements finish rather than merely conclude.
A business with an interior life that nobody has given it language for.
Zykr is a two-person atelier with a remote practice, working with founder-led premium businesses. We take a small number of engagements at a time, which is what lets the work be attended to.
- Hospitality
- Fine dining
- Premium food and drink
- Textiles and interiors
- Wellness and beauty
- The performing arts