The Person Behind
the Platform

I have learning disabilities. That fact is not incidental to my work — it is the foundation of it. Six years ago, drawing directly on that experience, I designed and ideated Messenger Pigeon from its foundations: a classroom observation and note-taking app built for the way attention actually works, not the way institutions assume it does.

What started as a product born from personal necessity has become Habitatlearn's flagship. I still lead it — working alongside our CEO to take it in new directions, gathering requirements through meetings with stakeholders like Apple Education and universities across North America, bridging design and development to make sure what gets built is both properly scoped and properly understood by the people building it.

Now the scope is expanding. We're travelling across North America, Europe, and Australia, building Podium — a cognitive accessibility as infrastructure project. The premise: the current model of accessibility is one-by-one, reactive, and slow. Podium is a universal model for basic accommodations, delivered at the level of the environment rather than the individual. It is the most ambitious thing I have worked on, and I believe it will matter.

I studied industrial design at OCAD University and graduated with honours. Industrial design taught me something that most digital product work ignores: that the physical world has constraints, and those constraints are generative. You cannot user-test your way out of a bad material choice. That discipline — thinking in systems, in bodies, in space — is the lens I carry into every interface I design.

I paint. I build software tools. And I create projection mapping experiences — site-specific, sensor-driven work built with TouchDesigner, creative materials, outdoor generators, and whatever the space demands. There is no clean separation between the digital and the physical in this work. The image lives on a surface. The surface talks back. The experience is the relationship between them.

Making things across disciplines is not a hobby alongside my real work. It is the mechanism by which my real work stays alive. Each domain borrows fluency from the others.

I host design meetups in Ottawa. The goal is simple: give people working in design a room to share what they know, figure out how to navigate an industry that is not always transparent about how it works, and find the people they didn't know they needed to know. The best thing a community can do is lower the cost of learning from each other.

I also host creative workshops at my design studio — hands-on sessions that bring together people from wildly different backgrounds to work on physical and digital projects side by side. A graphic designer and a carpenter and a developer in the same room, making something together, is one of the most productive environments I know. The promiscuous mixing of methods is the point.

I spent several years in master-level psychotherapy training before dropping out. I am proud of this. Not because I quit, but because quitting when something has given you what it has to give is a form of honesty that takes practice. Those years taught me how people carry their histories in their bodies, how organisations repeat the patterns of the families that founded them, how the gap between what someone says they want and what they build is almost always emotional rather than technical. I use that every day.

The productive life, as I understand it, is not about doing one thing exceptionally well in isolation. It is about building enough range that you can see the same problem from multiple angles at once — and being disciplined enough to actually finish things. The creative life is not opposed to the rigorous life. It is the rigorous life, applied to a broader surface area.

Accessibility is not a compliance checkbox or a feature to be added at the end. It is the design brief. When you design for the edges of human experience — for the person who is exhausted, or overwhelmed, or processing the world differently — you almost always make something better for everyone. That is not a trade-off. That is the work.

VP of Product — Habitatlearn

Leading Messenger Pigeon and building Podium — a cognitive accessibility infrastructure project — across North America, Europe, and Australia.

Designer & Maker — Studio

Projection mapping, TouchDesigner experiences, painting, and software tools built for problems worth solving.

Community — Ottawa

Design meetups and creative workshops bringing together practitioners across disciplines.