Anthropological Industrial Designer
Strategic, Innovative, & Futuristic Problem-Solver
PROJECTS
What does it mean to be human?
Each project below represents a line of inquiry I've pursued in the interest of answering this question.
I wrote a book!
What does it mean to be human?
What is the relationship between people and objects?
What is a 'technical artifact'?
How can we use our history, objects, and their histories to build our future?
In this book, I use several design projects to investigate the answers to these and other questions, with the hope to develop a blueprint to build the world I want to see.
A Possible Future Series
Life is a series of discoveries of how the perception of our greater environment
changes as our cognition matures. As individuals, these discoveries are often explorations of our complex, intersectional realities, which in turn are highly influenced by our physical and conceptual environment, including our heritage, local biome and culture, language, and current cognitive maturity. Sometimes
these explorations seem more like problems or challenges.
Humans create artifacts (both tangible and intangible) as a byproduct of these explorations and embodiment of the discoveries thereon. Is it possible to analyze these artifacts and reverse the process of discovery, in order to glean an understanding of its creator and their original exploration?
I often pause to take in the objects that surround me, and one of the first features that catches my attention is their materiality. In the current social climate, that thought is often accompanied by wondering how “sustainable” the object actually is; whether the material is of natural origin, how far the material had to travel in its and the object’s production, how much water was spent in its production, whether the material will biodegrade or be easily recycled into reuse… The inquiries, doubts, and complexities are endless.
This project was borne of my desire to understand the role played by materiality in the system of creation of technical artifacts; in other words, materiality’s role in making a technical artifact through its process of creation.
A Possible Future for Sustainable Living is my first attempt at to identify explore solutions to this generation's greater problems. As a designer, I want to play a role in visualizing a few of the most distant or fantastical futures (still supported by science) that could result, known as disruptive design and innovation. I use forecasting and backcasting to visualize one such possible future; a world that values technical artifacts and prioritizes the intentional imbuement of the information into their creation as a vehicle to establish long-term care for the whole planet as a fundamental law of its nature. My hope is that the ability to visualize such a world, one that prioritizes the wellbeing of all, will help bring us back to my proposed cycle of human problem solving.
What would it be like if we used bioluminescent plants, a biotechnology currently in development, to light an interior space? This project explored bringing design fiction to life; the objective was part immersive wonder, and part thought experiment to motivate people to think about the future they want to create and inhabit.
Giving a stunning antique china cabinet a quick facelift -- feeling like you got a new piece of furniture without adding to landfill.
How has the new china cabinet's technical artifact nature (the information contained in it) changed with this facelift?
What would it require to make a high-quality piece of furniture (almost) entirely out of waste?
What does my ideal chair look like?
A Possible Future for Medical Data Collection Devices is intended as a 3-for-1 examination of both speculative design and digital design as methods and/or mediums for the creation of medical and health-related technical artifacts. Specifically, to examine the impact these methods of artifact creation have on the user’s access to the information contained within them. APF: MedDevs is also an extension of APF: Sust, just within the context of medical devices. I hope to speculate upon and explore the possibilities in form & function of wearable medical devices in the world I imagined in previous projects.
Other Projects
Aynsley's Bookshelf (2020)
A shelf for every bookworm, with shelves that can be moved and adjusted to accommodate any arrangement and volume of books and knickknacks.
Traditional styling, with wooden lace corners and traditional cast handles.
George's Organizer (2021)
Wall-hanging organizer designed for the storage and easy retrieval of the belongings of the bestest boi, George, his mom, and their limited space availability.