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Where It Started
Where It Started
Long before I thought of myself as a designer, collision repair introduced me to the relationship between design and making. Through technical drafting and metal fabrication, I learned to turn measurements and drawings into physical forms, cutting and welding structural frames, then shaping sheet metal around them. Looking back, this was where I first learned to think in three dimensions, understand materials, and turn an idea on paper into something real.
Learning Through Use
Learning Through Use
Commercial driving introduced me to an entirely different side of the physical world. Over the years, I worked with trucks, trailers, machinery, loading systems, and equipment in environments where design decisions have very real consequences. I began noticing the little things: what made equipment intuitive or frustrating, what made a task safer or unnecessarily difficult, and how something that works on paper can behave very differently in the hands of the person actually using it.
Expanding What I Could Do
Expanding What I Could Do
I have always believed in learning new skills rather than becoming comfortable with what I already know. I returned to school to expand my commercial driving qualifications, earning my Class A CDL and additional endorsements. It gave me access to more complex equipment and reinforced something that has followed me throughout my career: when I encounter something I do not know how to do, my instinct is to learn how it works.
Where Design Takes Flight
Where Design Takes Flight
Aviation took my fascination with machines to another level. I became captivated by how an aircraft works as a complete system, from the shape of its wings and fuselage to its controls, electronics, engine, and built-in redundancies. Flight training gave me the opportunity to experience those systems firsthand. What fascinated me most was that no single feature makes an airplane remarkable. Thousands of design decisions work together to create something efficient, resilient, and capable of doing something that still feels extraordinary every time it leaves the ground.
Becoming a Designer
Becoming a Designer
Eventually, I realized that the common thread through many of my experiences was not simply operating or understanding physical products. I wanted to create them. I began formally studying industrial design and CAD, turning years of curiosity about how things are made, used, and improved into the skills to design them myself. For the first time, the different pieces of my professional journey began to feel less like separate paths and more like experiences that had been leading me toward the same place.
What Comes Next
Today, I am building the next chapter of that journey through industrial design. I bring with me experience from fabrication, transportation, aviation, and years spent interacting with products outside of a classroom. I want to design physical things with their entire journey in mind, from the moment they leave the assembly line to the day they reach the end of their useful life.
For me, that means thinking beyond the intended user. A product may be handled by factory workers, packed into boxes, stacked in warehouses, loaded onto trucks, trains, ships, or aircraft, and transported across countries before it ever reaches the person it was designed for. Along the way, it may be handled by people who speak different languages, work in demanding environments, have different physical abilities, or interact with it under circumstances far outside the everyday use case. I want to anticipate those interactions from the beginning, designing not only for the expected user and environment, but also for edge cases, accessibility needs, and less obvious interactions that can easily be overlooked.
I also believe thoughtful design should consider the environmental impact a product leaves behind. That can begin by reducing the amount of material, packaging, and resources needed in the first place, while creating products durable or adaptable enough to be reused rather than quickly replaced. When a product finally reaches the end of its useful life, material selection and thoughtful construction can make recycling and recovery more practical. Whether through recycled materials, less wasteful packaging, repairability, reuse, or easier disassembly, I want sustainability to be considered throughout the design process, shaping decisions from the earliest concept through the product’s eventual end of life.
To me, designing a product means considering not just the person who will own it, but the many hands it may pass through, the many environments it may enter, and the impact it leaves behind.
A Special Thank You
To my Mom, Lyssa Jones, who stood beside me through every chapter, especially the ones I never expected to write. When the road changed, you reminded me to keep moving. When I started again, you believed I could. So much of the road behind me was made possible because you were there, and wherever this journey leads next, a part of it will always belong to you.
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