About Ian Terry

I'm Ian Terry — founder of Aretetic Solutions and builder of systems that don't just function, but align. My work lives at the intersection of health data, participatory design, and ethical infrastructure. I believe that every platform, every policy, and every interface encodes a worldview; and that our responsibility is to make that worldview coherent, humane, and real.

Through Aretetic, I lead the development of DigitalCabinet: a data architecture platform designed for people, not abstractions. We help communities manage sensitive information, especially in rare disease and patient-led contexts, with tools that prioritize clarity, agency, and long-term trust. We work to design systems that serve the people living inside them.

My background spans UX research, rare disease advocacy, physics, linguistics, and full-stack development. Titles don't tell the whole story, though. I've spent my life tracing the hidden logic beneath the visible world: how values become structure, how instincts become systems, how our environments, both digital and physical, shape who we are allowed to be.

I'm also a producer for BigBadDungeon, a narrative-first TTRPG experience that explores story, identity, and play at scale, and I serve as Communications Co-Officer for the Clan MacEwen Society, helping preserve and communicate ancestral knowledge across continents.

In my off-hours, I return to the analog: blacksmithing, swordsmanship, gardening, and restoring what might otherwise be lost. I live in San Diego with my wife and daughter, and I build systems the way I tend my soil, with patience, attention, and an eye toward what will outlast me.

I've spent much of my life in motion over fifty countries, from fieldwork in remote clinics to conferences in capital cities, chasing the threads of rare disease, cultural infrastructure, and human resilience. But I return often: to San Diego, where my family lives and roots deepen; to Scotland and Ireland, where the land feels older than language and my ancestry still breathes through stone and mist. Travel,to me, is calibration; a way to stretch perspective and then come back clearer, more intact, more aware of what's worth carrying forward.

My work is driven by coherence. By the belief that when we align what we build with what matters most, we make better futures possible.