LONG WINDED BIO
I’m from the Chicago Area and have lived in San Francisco for over a decade.
My background includes studying philosophy, art and ecology as an undergraduate at Kenyon College in Ohio prior to venturing out to SF in 2000 to work as an interface design strategist. (The Netkitchen 2000 / 2001) Later, after the tech market ‘adjusted’, I worked building cabinets, apprenticed with a fine furniture maker and designed retail fixtures for local businesses. 3D & built environment work led me to attend industrial and architecture schools in SF, in Sweden, and the UK. These courses culminated as a Masters in Industrial Arts and Product Design from San Francisco State University and Brunel University. My focus was split between manufacturing systems, sustainable design and cognitive ergonomics / physical interface design.
I worked as a mass-market furniture designer at THInc. Design in San Francisco through the end of grad school, leaving to co-founded a design/build studio called Lichen Studios / Studio 315. This studio provided the space needed to develop and launch a mass-customization no-tools-needed flat-pack furniture company called Link Furniture. The business concept was based on a system of designs driven by numeric conditions (parametric) using SolidWorks with a goal of producing socially and environmentally sustainable furniture. The first line produced by the company launched at the 2008 International Contemporary Furniture Fair as ‘The Link Line’ and had varied local, national and international successes. The crux of the design system is in its flexibility. It allowed clients to quickly customize for fit, material finish and iconography, vertically influencing the design, manufacturing, and inventory to manifest the end product. The business model leveraged automated manufacturing technology in conjunction with just-in-time manufacturing and supply chain management techniques to enable the end user to think beyond small, medium and large. However, 2008 was a horrible time to launch a high sunk-cost business which required rather substantial minimum volumes to float.
Since then, my design work spanned socially responsible public projects, service design, sustainable manufacturing systems, a few consumer electronics products and furniture. All of these activities were interspersed with a hearty dose of advocacy work for socially and environmentally responsible design and simply attempting to push design as a best practice methodology to the business and NGO world.
Lichen Studios / Studio 315 – previously a furniture design studio – has grown. We’ve relocated twice and currently operate as an incubator for design based entrepreneurs that are both venture and grant funded one to five person companies. Our start-ups work in sustainable product design, medical device development, consumer electronics design, furniture, interaction and mobile application design.
Beyond professional practice, I’ve been active in the broader San Francisco design community serving for two years as chair of the local chapter of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) and advocating socially and environmentally sustainable design in the Bay Area. (2008 – 2010) This role included organizing conferences and competitions for students and professionals. We established a design entrepreneur series: Design Sight SF, a recurring sustainable design event called Digging Deeper which included workshops, panel discussions and eventually grew into an international design competition with designers from all over the world entering. (Icon-O-Cast Video Coverage: 1, 2). We then attempted a web-based TV channel focused on pulling back the curtain on product design in the Bay Area to promote the Bay as the worlds ID hot spot (Studio Explorations).
The IDSA experience established many important relationships with local, national and international design consultancies as well as Silicon Valley tech companies. As a neutral organization focused on advancing design, we developed relationships with local business communities and educational institutions. Some of these relationships include partnerships with Wharton West, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Net Impact, SCORE, CA Small Business Association, SF Made, the scientific research community through University of California San Francisco and the California Academy of Sciences; and SF Mayor’s Office along with many others.
After some successes promoting deep multi-disciplinary sustainable design issues within the community I was invited to speak at a conference called Sustainable Brands International and then to sit on the advisory board for the conference. Sustainable Brands focuses on bringing environmental activists, scientists and designers together with large brands to promote sustainable practices. The conference acts as a platform for interdisciplinary exchange and has a wonderful leverage point from which to impact the world towards more sustainable consumption behaviors through the reach and resources of massive brands. This relationship has grown my network in the sustainability community, given me many opportunities to write design updates for their community, guest edit articles, facilitate charrettes, moderate panels and help design the format and content of the conference.
For the past seven years I’ve also been fortunate to teach industrial design at local colleges in the Bay Area. In 2007 and 2008 at San Francisco State University’s Design and Industry Department and in 2009 I began lecturing at California College of the Arts (CCA). Recently I served as Interim Chair of CCA’s Industrial Design Department during the 2010/11 academic year and currently teach there as an Adjunct Professor of Industrial Design.
My current entrepreneurial project work is in the urban garden space…. look out for Almanac Garden Tools!