About

I have run a pharmacy for fifteen years. Along the way I built Power BI dashboards for other pharmacies, sold them door to door, and shut the business down when the customers told me I had designed for someone I had imagined.

That is the short version of how I became a designer.

The longer one: I co-founded a retail pharmacy in Rhodes in 2011 and still operate it, through the Greek debt crisis, capital controls, mandated price cuts and COVID. Somewhere in there I stopped being interested in running the business and became interested in why people behave the way they do inside it. So I did two design MScs: Integrated Product Design and Innovation at the University of the Aegean, then Interaction Design at Cyprus University of Technology and Tallinn University, taught in English.

After them I founded DATAPULSE, a Power BI analytics product built directly on the ERP database I use every day. I built it over a year, with ChatGPT as my build partner, then took it to around 90 pharmacies — 10 demos, 2 paying customers. Discovery told me two things I should have found out first: pharmacists did not want more metrics, they wanted work taken off them; and many of them never entered purchase invoices digitally, so the data my product depended on did not exist in their systems. I closed the business in June 2024 on that evidence rather than spend further into it. It taught me more than either degree did.

The MScs gave me the research methods: a two-sample study of 115 doctors and 65 patients in the first, and 18 hours of structured observation across three working pharmacies in the second. Since then I have used them outside a university — a 260-person survey across 25 countries for a Parkinson’s exercise app — and I work in SQL and Power BI every day on the pharmacy’s own data.

I work with AI the way other people work with a team: I decide what needs to exist, I direct it, I read everything it gives back, and I keep only what survives. Right now, with Claude Code, I am building a back-office ordering system on my own pharmacy’s live ERP. It runs and prints orders; the interface design is still ahead of me, and nothing changes in the pharmacy until the pharmacist has reviewed it. It is aimed squarely at what DATAPULSE’s discovery uncovered — take work off the pharmacist instead of handing them another dashboard.