design . prototype . change
Connect me with your design and development teams to advocate for customers, build brand narratives, and design your next experience.
As a designer, maker, and master teacher, I have spent over twenty years perfecting the craft of conversation, as a means of excavation, to understand who people are and where they wish to go.
PROJECTS
strategy, design, business, and education
Identitype
Strategy and Design Lead
Brand leadership business Identitype had developed innovative assessments products, but was seeking greater growth opportunity. As head of strategy and design, I’m helping the founder pivot from a discrete product sales model into an integrated solutions services model. Our work has yielded a dramatically expanded set of value adding service offerings, leveraging our existing intellectual property.
My engagement with Identitype began with an inventory and analysis of products, processes, and markets. From there I created a roadmap for developing new offerings, mapping process and technology dependencies, and prioritizing and sequencing critical business efforts. I plan the roll out of services, design visualizations of the offerings, write marketing narratives, prototype consulting frameworks, create websites and pitches, and develop client facilitation sessions. My work has helped organize the growth strategy for Identitype and aided the founder with the formalization of the Identitype method of data-driven brand alignment.
Professional Practices
Co-founder, Designer, Director
Increasing questioning of the value of a college education and a need to find competitive advantage gave rise to the Professional Practices (P2) program. Students were demonstrating a struggle to connect academic concepts, techniques, and exercises with professional opportunities. This challenge presented us with a pressing urgency for a compelling solution at Memphis College of Art.
As faculty and director of the program, I collaboratively developed a comprehensive initiative to rally the school around a set of values, outcomes, and programming directly linked to professional success. This initiative knitted together the whole curriculum with career development and creative economic opportunities sprouting up throughout the city, which simultaneously was declaring a deep devotion to innovation.
IF A STATE OF HIGH QUALITY IS THAT IN WHICH ALL DISTRACTION IS REMOVED
...my work is both to clarify need and distill and launch dynamic solutions.
Manifest Eleven
Co-Developer, Creative Lead
Sensing opportunity or dysfunction, and implementing appropriate change, presents distinct challenges for individuals and organizations alike. Many possess one piece of the puzzle, but struggle to put it all together. This need inspired us to deliver a clear holistic approach to shifting behavior and outcomes informed by our decades of experience transitioning organizations.
Manifest Eleven (M11) is a management method that enables organizations to envision and enact the change necessary, before crisis, to be viable while facing ever changing pressures and opportunities. Telling the right story is critical to every business, not only externally, but internally. M11’s approach to creating transparency, unity, and vitality around purpose, capacity, and timing catalyzes an organization’s ability to rapidly transform themselves creating a sustained thriving future. The quantitative and qualitative processes of M11 create an operational reality that matches aspirational narratives orienting organizations and individuals for continuous success.
THE YOUTH ARE OUR EXPERTS
...and they are the experts of the products, the services, and the organizations that are yet to come. They know their own demand and they are able to solve for the emerging needs of our population.
Creatives-In-Residence
Program Designer, Creative Lead
Often unrelated challenges provide fertile ground for innovation. College students’ competing needs to focus academically, work to pay for school, and develop professional skills and experience along with area organizations’ persistent need for affordable design and strategy provided the catalyst for the Creatives-In-Residence program.
Created as win-win solution for business and education, Creatives-In-Residence at Memphis College of Art is a group facilitated internship program. Under experienced staff leadership, teams of undergraduates go into the field to provide creative services to regional companies, civic entities, and organizations. Students develop real world skills, gain credit toward graduation, and earn competitive compensation all while building their portfolios and gaining access to a pipeline to post-internship employment.
Each of us has our own authentic and innate desires, challenges, and direction. In my work, I aim to guide groups and individuals to clarify these distinctive needs and create inspired and collaborative solutions that contribute to a more peaceful and productive world.
Imagine U
Co-founder, Designer, Creative Lead
Current labor markets with shortened job tenure and decreased job security pose a critical challenge for recent graduates and the colleges that educate them. The workplace demands more, but offers less in return, especially among contract creatives. Facing this shift, Imagine U set out to make radical collaboration the cornerstone of an economic and educational solution.
Imagine U is an intercollegiate entrepreneurship accelerator co-created by seven colleges with three community entrepreneurship support organizations. The unique integrated program between competing schools brings a Summer immersion experience to students seeking to challenge themselves, learn real world skills, expand their networks, follow their vision, and launch their business and social venture ideas.
Memphis Design Lab
Co-Founder, Facilitator
Diminished budgets have led to the reduction, sometimes removal, of the arts from many public schools, leaving creatively inclined youth hungry for ways to develop and express their talent. Consequently this leads to a diminished and less diverse emerging workforce for creative professions. Many community educational support organizations strive to fill the gap with programming, but struggle to hold the attention of high school students. In this landscape we created Memphis Design Lab to empower youth through design education and real world experience, expanding opportunity for teens, creating a pipeline to higher education and the creative economy, and providing quality problem solving service to the community.
The Memphis Design Lab (MDL) is a community-hosted design education initiative offering high school students engaging real world experience and career development in locations where few creative educational resources exist.
In my work I aim to reveal hidden purpose, uncover challenges, map core structures and systems, and address real needs.
I am an institutional archaeologist who gains great satisfaction in the process of discovering the bottom line, “why”.
PALS
Founding Fellow, International Summit Co-Coordinator
Human generated climate change poses a deep question for education: how do we teach students in such a way that empowers them to reverse the global shifts they have inherited? Further, how do we train creatives to make more while using less, so future generations have the resources to thrive? PALS was born to address these thorny issues.
The Partnership for Academic Leadership on Sustainability (PALS) is a collaboration between colleges and universities focused on solving the challenges of global climate change through the power of creativity and an art and design education. PALS operates as an interdisciplinary thinktank of faculty, staff, and administrators who share expertise, create collective action, and empower change agents. As a collaboration between competing schools PALS helps each member school accelerate its own initiatives to create a sustainable future for the planet and a viable future for art and design education.
Three Eggs
Ideator, Designer, Presenter
One day, upon receiving a hand drawn org chart from my boss’s boss, which was a visual representation of the utter chaos my institution was experiencing, the lightbulb went off and the Three Eggs Project was born. I had long observed parts of my institution working in different directions, warring over territory, and wasting [already scarce] resources. There was a systemic fear of the future, and few colleagues seemed to have the reserves to imagine how it could shift for the better.
The three eggs project is an organizational structural re-envisioning based on united purpose and collaboration rather than hierarchy and individual vertical report chains.