Making · Craft · Research
Studio
Before the platforms and the regulated systems, there was a bench. Physical products, hand built models, and a sketching habit that never stopped: that is the foundation the professional work stands on.
I hold to a simple test: good design has to add tangible value to the people who live with it. Victor Papanek wrote that “there are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a few of them.” I have never been able to unhear it. Usability, safety, sustainability, and honesty about what a product is for are not finishing touches. They are where I start.
The work I return to keeps teaching the same lesson. Frank Lloyd Wright and Tadao Ando, for how built space quietly shapes how people move and feel. Dieter Rams and Jasper Morrison, for the discipline of reducing an object to what genuinely serves. Purity, and human warmth. Everything on this page was made by hand first.
The test
Tangible value · Usability ·Safety · Sustainability · Honesty
- Human factors · Research
If the instrument
matters, build it yourself
Studying how drivers behave at unfamiliar intersections needs an environment you can control completely, so we built one. I worked on the rig itself: a full driving position wrapped in a virtual road, with the cab, the projection, and the software and hardware stitched together until steering input, road surface, and instrument response felt like one continuous thing. Real traffic patterns from a state highway were rebuilt inside the simulation so the scenarios would ask honest questions. The lesson stuck: an experiment is a product too, and its users are the researcher and the person behind the wheel. The attention research that ran on this rig lives in the Spatial UX case study.
Fig. 01 · Driving rig, cab, projection, and controls
Hardware and software, integrated as one instrument
- Product design · Patented
Patented · Use-error design
When supply ran out,
the box became the product
When respirators ran short, hospitals began decontaminating and reusing them, and suddenly the box mattered as much as the mask. I led user research with frontline clinical staff, then designed a patented storage system around the CDC reuse protocol. Ventilation keeps each respirator dry between cycles. The boxes stack without wobbling on a crowded shelf. The labels sit at an angle a tired nurse can read at the end of a shift, because the failure mode here is not dramatic, it is a mask going back on the wrong face. I learned to treat packaging as a use-error problem: the object has to defend the protocol even when nobody has time to think about it.
Fig. 02 · Storage box, closed
Fig. 03 · Ventilation and label detail
Fig. 04 · Boxes stacked in use
- Product design · Craft
Hand-built · Mixed media · Shortlisted
Prototyped end to end by hand
One watch, every step by hand
Two timepiece concepts, shortlisted for the Breil Milano Timepiece Design Award by designboom, and the work I still hold to the highest standard because nothing about it was outsourced. I drew it, modeled it, printed the case parts, cut the leather for the straps, and finished every surface myself until the object in my hand matched the object in my head. Hand finishing is slow, and that is the point. Every hour spent sanding a case back teaches you where a radius wants to break, how a strap wants to fold, what a crown should feel like. That knowledge walks into every screen design as an instinct for tolerances, materials, and the difference between resolved and almost.
Fig. 05 · Finished timepiece, hand finished case and strap
Fig. 06 · First sketches
Fig. 06 · First sketches
Fig. 06 · First sketches
Fig. 06 · First sketches
- Product design · Concept
Concept · Shortlisted
Two answers to the same question
The Fujitsu Design Award asked what personal computing should become next, and I sent two answers: an ultra portable laptop and LivePack, a companion concept for carrying your computing with you. Both were shortlisted from a field of more than three thousand designers across ninety nine countries, by a jury that included Ross Lovegrove and Ma Yansong. Concept work is where I test form language without a factory attached: push a proportion further than production would allow, resolve it anyway, and find out which ideas survive contact with manufacturable reality. The discipline runs both ways. The concepts stay honest to how they would be made, and the production work inherits their ambition.
Fig. 10 · Ultra portable laptop concept
Fig. 11 · LivePack companion concept
Fig. 06 · First sketches
- Craft · Ideation
Sketching · Ongoing practice
The thinking happens on paper
Every project on this site started the same way: a pen, a stack of paper, and an hour of drawing before any software opened. Perspective studies, exploded views, mechanisms, proportions tried and rejected ten times a page. Sketching is not documentation for me, it is the actual thinking. A drawing is the cheapest prototype there is, cheap enough to be wrong about fifty ideas before lunch, and resolving form on paper first is what keeps the later, expensive stages calm. I keep the practice running between projects the way a musician keeps scales, because the hand goes quiet without it. These sheets are working documents, shown as they are.
Fig. 13 · Working sheet, product forms Fig. 14 · Perspective studies Fig. 15 · Exploded mechanism Fig. 16 · Form iterations Fig. 17 · Proportion studies
Making is how I think. The rigor in the case studies did not arrive with the job titles. It was built at this bench, one model, one box, one sheet of paper at a time.