About Me.
From live experience entrepreneur to digital UX designer.
Will cross the street to pet your dog 🐕 Backpacked my first thirty five passport stamps 🎒Weakness for any house music with a piano 🎶 Will take the lead in a crisis 🚒
Design nerd 🤓 Off road adventurer 🚙 Will offer to draw you new livingroom floor plan 🛋 Farm kid 🌲 Loyal gym pal 🏋️♂️ Patronus: Golden Retriever
M Y S T O R Y
Drive
I have always had a desire to create and improve experiences for people. Noticing pain points, design failures, and opportunities for how products, experiences, and companies could be even better is the default setting for my busy brain. I have a never-ending drive to solve problems and reimagine a more effective, more beautiful, or simply more enjoyable way of doing things.
Entrepreneurship
When I arrived at UBC with big ideas about what college life would be like, I was a little underwhelmed, and I wasn’t alone. For many, UBC fell short of the iconic campus life experience & student community many students hope for. So I learned how to code and built a website to fix it. Around the same time, I read The Lean Startup and fell in love with the human-centered design and tech culture and began putting it use. I built a company, that 9 years later, continues to use the human-centered design process to teach, ideate, test, and execute iconic sellout experiences for 25,000 guests annually.
Human-Centered Design
My first formal introduction to design thinking was a full-time city design and dialogue program at SFU, followed by a lean business accelerator program for my company. In both programs I worked as part of a team, completing weekly sprints to research and validate business and product hypotheses, and pitched in front of mentors and investors at the end of each week.
Founder & Principal
The Calendar
Challenge
For many, UBC lacked the iconic campus life experience & community many students hope for. I built a company that used lean and design thinking to reimagine student life on campus, producing events, digital media and a website.
Highlights
Nine years later, the company continues to sell out more than 20 annual ticketed events ranging from 500 to 9500 guests, totalling 25,000 guests annually. The Calendar’s viral events and content has been covered and broadcast around the world multiple times by major international media including: Good Morning America, Buzzfeed Front Page, World Star HipHop, McLeans Print Magazine and all primetime Canadian cable news outlets.
T R A I N I N G & E X P E R I E N C E
Monstercat, Red Academy UX
After graduation, I designed and toured live brand experiences for Monstercat and launched the record labels new live experience department. After Monstercat I enrolled in Red Academy’s full-time UX Designer Professional Program and fell in love with digital user experience design.
UBC, Manager of Campus Experience
On the verge of jumping into digital design, UBC offered me an opportunity to apply the UX design process to research and improve UBC’s non-academic student experience. Working on special projects for the UBC President I put the skills I had just learned into practice to research, design and champion high impact legacy projects for UBC’s 65,000 student users.
Red Academy UI
After extending my contract for a second year at UBC it was time to sharpen my skills and start the digital chapter of my experience career. I completed Red Academy's full-time UI Designer Professional Program, and had a blast advancing my visual design theory, progressing my technical skills and refining my design workflow and overall efficiency.
Manager of Campus Experience
University of British Columbia
Challenge
UBC ranks as a top academic university but census data reports low sense of belonging and school pride, metrics that are inversely correlated to academic success and likeliness to recommend UBC. I was hired onto a special project for the UBC president to research and define the problem, and then design and implement strategies to improve the non-academic student experience.
Highlights
Researched, designed, pitched and secured 200k in project funding. Designed & implemented 1/2 km long winter lighting installation, now installed annually from Nov to March. Complete Homecoming experience and marketing redesign resulted in record-breaking attendance, an increase in ticket price, ocean view sunset Ferris wheel, and now famous halftime dog show.
Manager of Campus Experience + UBC Life
University of British Columbia
Challenge
The recently renovated 20,000 Sq Ft Old SUB was underused, over budget, and unfinished. I was hired to research, understand, recommend, and implement interventions to bring the student resource building to life.
Highlights
Researched, designed, pitched and secured 175k in additional project funding. Doubled the total seating capacity and daily use of the building. Installed 7 VanMuralFest murals inside the building to support new researched and tested vision for building as ‘giant, trendy, industrial, community study cafe’.
