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21 projects

The Thoughts

  1. explaining thingsJUL 2026How do you explain a complex, honestly boring technical subject so someone leans in instead of glazing over?
  2. adjacency is not accessJUN 2026A floor plan tells you which rooms touch. It will not tell you which rooms you can actually reach, and the gap between those two drawings is where the architecture is hiding.
  3. buildings that respondJUN 2026Right now a building is a fixed guess. Someone chose the ceiling height and the window size years before you arrived, and you live inside their averaged assumptions whether they fit you or not.
  4. experiences are dataMAY 2026You learned what a room does to you by being in rooms. Nobody sat you down with a dataset.
  5. comfort as dataMAY 2026You don't walk into a room and average your experience. You walk in and the thing that's wrong is the thing you notice: the glare, the echo, the cold draft on the back of your neck.
  6. when the tool scores peopleAPR 2026I build things that give a room a score. The obvious next question, and the one I would ask me, is what happens the day somebody uses that score to decide who gets the room.
  7. latent spaceAPR 2026Machine learning borrowed the word space from us, and I would like to check what it did with it.
  8. drawing as interfaceMAR 2026For most of my life the drawing was the output. You designed the thing, then you drew it to prove it existed.
  9. behavior information modelingJAN 2026For thirty years we've been getting very good at Building Information Modeling: every beam, every duct, every clash, tracked to the millimeter.
  10. heritage meets new techDEC 2025The usual choice with an old building is a trap: treat it as a museum piece no one may touch, or drop a glass-and-steel box in the middle and call it modern.
  11. neuroaestheticsDEC 2025Neuroaesthetics is the unglamorous name for a question everyone already feels: why does one room settle you and another keep you on edge?
  12. evolutionary searchNOV 2025Evolutionary search is what I reach for when a problem is too tangled to solve head on: describe what good looks like, then let a population of designs breed, mutate, and compete until something clever falls out.
  13. physics solversNOV 2025A physics solver is the most honest collaborator I have: it doesn't care what I intended, only what I actually built.
  14. computationOCT 2025Computation is not the same as using a computer, and separating the two took me longer than I would like to admit.
  15. what an llm actually isSEP 2025A large language model is a machine that guesses the next word. That is not me being kind to you, that is the whole thing.
  16. generative aiDEC 2023Generative AI made the inspired gesture free. Anyone can produce a thousand renders before lunch, and a render is a promise, not a product.
  17. extended realitySEP 2022I started in a lab strapping headsets onto students to see whether a lesson lands harder when you can walk around inside it.
  18. connecting the dotsJUN 2020When the art class was asked who here dislikes drawing, mine was the only hand that went up. Awkward.

Chair Simulation

Can your sitting posture design its own chair? 

TYPEExplorationsTEAMMACAD BOOTCAMP · SIMULATIONSTACKGRASSHOPPER · KANGAROO · VOXELS
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WHAT

An inflatable pillow mesh and a set of sitting stance meshes go into Kangaroo: pressure goals inflate the pillow, collision with the pose shapes it, and the settled mesh is captured as the chair. A voxelation pass then rebuilds it from a soft rubber ring module, with damping and voxel size as the two dials. Eight poses in the matrix, eight different chairs.

WHY

Because the honest way to design for a body is to let the body push back. The simulation does the ergonomics; the voxels point it toward something you could assemble from one repeated module.

HOW

  1. A sitting body does the designing: the posed human mesh is fixed, and an inflatable pillow mesh is pressurized against it in Kangaroo.
  2. Collision is the pencil. Pressure pushes the pillow out, the body pushes back, and the settled mesh is captured as the chair.
  3. A voxel pass rebuilds the soft result from one repeated caoutchouc ring module, with damping and voxel size as the two dials.
  4. It is one Grasshopper pipeline end to end, so swapping the sitter reruns everything: eight postures in the matrix, the trials for babies included.

WHAT CAME OF IT

Two findings stayed. The material one: a chair built from caoutchouc rings could be fun, breathable and comfortable in the same object, giving where the body lands and airing where it does not. The method one: who is sitting matters as much as how. The pipeline that molds a chair around an adult reshapes it around a baby without a single redrawn line, which is the honest argument for simulating furniture instead of drawing it.