About
I’m a writer, editor and researcher at a design consultancy in Portland, Oregon called Ziba. I have a background in industrial design, education and engineering. I’ve lived and worked in Portland since 2006, and developed an interest in bicycles, beer, urban planning and seasonal produce, as Portlanders tend to.
Education
I was born in Los Angeles, grew up in a small town near Boulder, Colorado, and attended high school and university in southern California. I received a BS in Structural Engineering from UC San Diego in 1994, but realized upon graduation that the process of learning about engineering appealed to me more than the prospect of practicing it. I entered the US Peace Corps in 1995, serving an extended tour in Tanzania, first as a high school science teacher in Tanga region, then as an education technical trainer for newly arrived trainees at the Peace Corps Training Center in Arusha.
Reverse culture shock is a well-documented phenomenon among returning volunteers, and a proven strategy for avoiding it is to move to an unfamiliar place in the US upon completing service; after hitchhiking though southern Africa for half a year, I moved to New York City in 1998 and taught science at the Horace Mann School. During that time I traveled extensively in the summers, and explored a range of engineering- and design-related careers during the school year, settling on Industrial Design in 2001. I received my Masters in ID from the Pratt Institute in 2004, writing my thesis on the emotional effects of technology in presentation settings, and meeting Allan Chochinov, the editorial director at Core77.
Work
My freelance Industrial Design and design writing careers both began in the summer of 2004: the former with a custom furniture building project for Barneys New York, and the latter with a feature article on Core77 about the lack of a coherent identity in American furniture design.
From 2004 to 2009 I contributed as a designer to 30 or so different projects: massive sculptures, toys, metal detectors, remote controls and others. My involvement in these projects ranged from small contributions of 3D CAD modeling (primarily in SolidWorks and Pro/Engineer), user and market research, and sketch development, to long-term project leadership and fully-detailed tooling design. For a selection of these projects, take a look at the Portfolio section of this site.
Over the past two years, writing, editing and research have grown to constitute the majority of my duties and expertise. I began contributing regularly to the Core77 front page blog in June of 2007, took over Coroflot’s Creative Seeds blog in October of that same year, and assumed a full-time position as Coroflot editorial director in November of 2008. My responsibilities grew thereafter to include community management, social media engagement, and content strategy. I left Core77 and Coroflot in December of 2009; see the Writing section of this site for an overview of my contributions there, and the farewell blog post written shortly after I departed.
I’ve worked since early 2010 full time as a design writer, editor and researcher in Portland.