About me
The process of making things has captivated me throughout my life. It first led me to graduate college with a degree in applied physics. However, a theoretical knowledge of things was not enough. That’s why five years later, I graduated a second time - this time with a degree in Industrial Design. Accidentally living the mantra of "learn and repeat."
As a design physicist (yep, a made-up term), I am equal parts functional and simple. The work of design is to take something very complex and make it seem easy. The simplest things take the most work to implement. Felt tip pens should be crisp and Wi-Fi should be fast. I do not accept things that do not work.
You might be shocked to find that my desk is often a design tornado. Final ID models, deconstructed models, hand models, torn up competitor products, spliced together competitor products -- anything and everything that has to do with the program at hand, is littered throughout my space. Watch, learn, do, fail, repeat.
To generate great design, one must be able to understand first the things that do not work. The first several hundred ideas you have can be total garbage. But if you understand why they do not work and iterate again, you will eventually arrive at a better and more thoughtful solution.
An end goal is not a single, or even a finite, thing - there are many paths you can take to get to a solution. For me, it is about the journey of understanding, a technology, feature, gesture, or geometric expression that all inform the final design. All parts of that design need to be balanced and crafted to support the object's purpose. Understanding that purpose, and making the tradeoffs needed to get there, especially within a product team, is what generates truly great design.
Why?
From as early as I was able, I wanted to figure it all out. How does a car door work? How can you cook eggs? How long is a piece of economy dental floss? (FYI enough to interconnect every object in a child 's bedroom roughly five times.) A theoretical understanding of things is a great start. Then comes the fun of application. To this day, my approach to life remains unchanged; watch, learn, do, fail, repeat.
I’d love to live in a future packed with sci-fi and gadgets or maybe one utterly bereft of technology. This is a schism I haven’t quite managed to balance. I love the highest of high tech and also aim to live completely off the grid. This dichotomy is evident in my work: The simple world connected.
