Loom is a consumer products company making gear for parents and families. Responsibilities include managing operations, marketing, design, product development, sales, branding, web presence, and sourcing. Since my involvement began in late 2006, we have been focusing on tuning up an already successful brand and complimenting the existing product line with a broad series of product categories designed to help the company grow dramatically.

JackNyfe is a social networking/web services company focused on overlaying social actions on web links. Along the way we investigated opportunities for mp3 player to player transfer and fingerprinting of music behavior. Inventures activities for this brand have included in-home user research (the best kind), user experience, user interface, visual identity with Alchemy Labs, marketing plans, financial planning, investor/customer presentations, strategic planning, intellectual property, and basic web site development.

Imago is a consumer products company making media storage systems (photos, compact disks, etc.) for the specialty retail market. Capital was raised from private investors, developed the product line, established tooling and production resources in China, and created brand identity in print and on the web. Imago markets the product line and sells to stores in the USA and Japan including Friends, Zinc Details, Mxyplyzyk, Tokyu Hands, Loft, and the Modern Art Museum (Fort Worth).

Founded in 1998, Inventures is a consulting firm and develops speculative products through licensing and venture creation. The primary focus on licensing has been consumer products for the home including tools and housewares. Teams are formed based on the needs of a particular concept (e.g. intellectual property, product/graphic design, mechanical engineering, database development, prototyping, etc.) and compensated with equity in the ultimate sale of the property. Several deals have closed to date including a multi-use car blanket to Axius (owned by Shell) and a hard/soft hydration concept to Camelbak. On the consulting side, Target has been an excellent consulting client - they have a very smart outlook on how design meets the mainstream and have created an effective "expect more, pay less" strategy to counter the "every day low price" strategy of the behemoth Wal-Mart. We proposed new concepts for product categories and chose to focus on the evolving lifestyle of the car, baby boomers who refuse to get old, safety and security (several years after 9/11), environmentally responsible products/services, and emerging work habits spilling over into the home. Consulting projects usually involve research into user behavior, consumer and demographic trends, product design, and business factors like patents, channel distribution, and sourcing.

IDEO was an excellent chance to work for a huge variety of world class brands. Our focus was on user-centered research and full service product development (one of the first design firms to pull this off). I began my career there as a senior designer and advanced to managing director of our San Francisco office within several years. I always enjoyed clients and their projects in addition to managing day to day activities, and we were still able to grow the office from 20 to 40 people and triple revenues. The studio identity was fiercely multi-disciplinary with teams of industrial designers, interaction designers, human factors specialists, mechanical/electrical engineeringers, and experience prototypers. My accomplishments there included creating a signature office space over the waters of San Francisco bay, directing an award winning light switch concept project featured in the Museum of Modern Art New York, strategy for Kodak ("What are we going to do about this digital camera thing?"), and product design programs for Apple, Dell, 3M, NEC, Humphrey Instruments, Stryker, Nellcor, Hughes, Casio, Avocet, and Whirlpool/KitchenAid. It was a great time to be there with an incredibly talented team. Images shown are generally team projects which I worked on as a designer or as a project manager.

Being a professor at California College of the Arts is one of the most satisfying things I do with my time. For me, it requires skills to understand each student, find what they are good at, and help them exploit it to their advantage. I teach the "boot camp" course which establishes high levels of craftsmanship and excellence as well as serving as an introduction to the world of design. They work incredibly hard but leave with the basic skills and language for their further education. The students get me again several years later for a product design course related to creating user experiences with products. The learning at this stage seems to be most effective through lots of one on one discussion. We establish criteria and work iteratively through solutions on a conceptual and a visual level. Finally, I teach a class on the business of design which covers consulting, corporate design processes, creating and running businesses, intellectual property, and basic financial issues.