where i came from
I spent the first 13 years of my life in Ontario, born and raised just outside of Toronto in a suburb called Scarborough. We lived in a neighbourhood colloquially referred to as "Chine" (due to its location on Chine Drive and possession of an elementary school with the same name). Chine was woven and warped within a large forest that included the beautiful Scarborough bluffs. Many days of my young life took place between the steep hills of this park.
When I wasn't running through the ravines after school, I spent weekends, Christmases, and summers at my grandparents' house on Cameron Lake about 2 hrs north of Toronto. (Huron-Wendat, Anisjnabek, Mississaugas of the Credit and Haudenosaunee territories). With popular activities being Driftwood art, backcountry sculpture, treehouse construction, and pudding fights... nothing was off limits at the cottage. This is where my values of spending time with nature, family, working with my hands, getting dirty, and caring for the people and place around me were formed.
Looking back, I have spent much of my life making countless transitions between the wild, natural, unconstructed experiences of being in nature and the ritualistic, communal, structured experiences of life as a modern human. This has inevitably made it into my design practice. Questions of our duties to our home, its other inhabitants, and our duties to ourselves are frequently ruminating.
where i am going
From beginning my degree at Emily Carr, dead set on becoming a furniture designer, to graduating directly into a position as a designer with the City of Vancouver, working on design solutions to tackle systemic food waste, my journey has been far from direct.
But it is through this diverse set of experiences that I learned it is less about what I am designing and more about why. I always enjoyed the question: if you had two designers tasked with designing a chair, one obsessed with the design process and the other obsessed with chairs, who would produce the better design? Now replace the word chair in this with public space, user interface, home, etc.
I don't know if there is a correct answer to this question, but I know that I am no longer obsessed with chairs. My career after university became focused on how we can use design to break down these giant, complex problems and use the tools of design thinking to find creative, impactful, and honest solutions to them. Whether that was reducing waste and increasing food education in our grocery stores or helping advocate for and create public spaces that spark joy, connection, comfort, and belonging, I am still fascinated by design's role in tackling these big questions. With endless learning still to come, I am excited to see what is next.
thanks for reading :)