I was born and raised in Westwood, New Jersey a smallish suburban town lying in the looming shadow of New York City nestled in the Pascack Valley. It’s the kind of town that young married urbanite couples move away to when they hit thirty and decide to raise a family. I cannot imagine having grown up anywhere else. It’s a twenty-minute drive to the city (on a good day), an hour from the shore, and forty-five minutes to Harriman State Park, which satiated my desire for mountains.

Here I grew as a young boy, my time spent mostly at Zion Lutheran Elementary School filling my head with typical school subjects like reading, writing, and arithmetic, all the while navigating the prepubescent social playground as it were. I was fortunate enough to have been at a school that annually held an event called the invention convention, which was essentially the design process for kiddies. A social / environmental / domestic problem had to be addressed and a solution was to be reached usually in some form of a product. While not sitting in a desk scratching away with a pencil to paper, I spent my time mastering the arts of basketball and baseball on various town and school teams and on the street courts. Disregarding, Lego directions and making my own monstrosities was also a favorite pastime.

Leaving my boyhood behind I entered Westwood Jr. / Sr. High School as a freshman. It was here I discovered and fell head over heels in love with skateboarding and snowboarding. Every waking hour not spent in class or studying was spent in the parking garages, parking lots and backyard jerry-rigged ramps and rails. I had left organized baseball years earlier and now school basketball slowly went the way of the buffalo as I realized the works of art that were out there to be created on the blank canvases of the miles of virgin asphalt, concrete and the nearby snow covered mountains (if you can call them mountains) of west Jersey. I didn't leave organized sports altogether. I actually picked up soccer along the way, playing both J.V. and Varsity.

Although I did well in all of my classes at school, it was two classes that I remember fondly and had a huge impact on my eventual decision to go to university as an Industrial Design major. These were all of my art classes (which I didn’t actually discover until Junior year of high school) and a class called Inventions and Innovations where we built various cool things like a humane mousetrap and other interesting projects that did not seem not much like typical schoolwork.

Like most kids at the age of eighteen I had no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, but I knew I liked making things. Armed with this self-knowledge, and my father’s advice to choose a career you love with a passion, I applied and was accepted to Rochester Institute of Technology’s Industrial Design program in Rochester, New York.

As my skill set increased I began to develop a design philosophy that I believe has served me well during and since my four years at RIT. Of all places, it largely developed out of my experiences in high school at those late night skate sessions.  In skateboarding, a concrete ledge is not simply a means to separate parking lots.  It is recontextualized. The mundane becomes the extraordinary. The ledge becomes a means to accomplish something beautiful. You are forced to see the potential of your surrounding environment in completely different and exciting ways. Ordinary staircases summon moments of elation. There is a joy that comes when you hurl yourself down that staircase and ride away unscathed and you think to yourself, “That was one of the coolest things I have ever done!” It was this attitude that I brought into my design education. Having been through four years of school, I feel I have pieced together a unique approach to design that recognizes the balancing act that must occur between all elements of the design process, from economic feasibility, to material selection to initial concept, environmental responsibilities, and dealing with the client. However, when all is said and done I always refer back to my roots in those skateboarding days. I look at what I have created and say to myself. “Is there anything about what I have just created that makes people say whoa! that is awesome! I like to think it is my job as a designer to create an assault on the senses, as well as the mind, whether it be by visual, conceptual, or other means. That being said, there is really nothing else I can write that can't be communicated better in my portfolio. Check it out; let me know what you think! and thanks for stopping by my site. I hope you enjoy it.