 I decided to attend Emily Carr University because when I was going to high school, my dad at one point in time brought me one of the yearbooks and in it I started flipping through and seeing like, whoa, look at all these industrial designs, this looks super fun. My name is Pat Christie, I'm an industrial designer, artist, and social innovator with a specialization in the wood products industry. At my time at Emily Carr what was great is foundation, you were exposed to like every single possible medium you wanted to. This year I was in 3D design, I was in print making, sculpture, second year it was all industrial design. I wanted to get my hands on solid materials, metals, plastics, ceramics. So after graduating from Emily Carr I went overseas and did a course in France. A big part of that was opening my eyes to like the potential of design and the impact you can have on local industries. Daily Co came out of me looking at how I could actually participate in design in Vancouver. What's the opportunity here? How can I bring design skills and pair that with the local industry to do something that was a bit more innovative and would became this obvious choice. My practices evolved quite a bit since leaving Emily Carr because you're taught a lot of fundamental skills and design practices and then when you go into the professional world you got to figure out how you can actually use those as part of the process and developing the artistic practice that I have has really informed a lot of my design work as well. The U-Wood Shop is a shared wood studio founded by Daniel Dzinsky, Logan Gilday, myself and Ben McLaughlin and we started shaping it into our version of the Emily Carr shop because tools, machinery and that shared space was really important to the creation of good work. Now we know we're taking on a handful of fun contracts where we work together but we also work independently. But when it comes to hosting meetings we really needed something that was beyond this space, a place where people can gather, connect and show their work. Where we meet and we talk about the products we're working on, we have feedback sessions, we bring in individuals to show 3D printed parts they're working on. A lot of the ideas from my work come from interacting with people and the community around space in the U-Wood Shop. Design and creativity are a way to connect groups, connect people. A new design creates a new conversation between a supplier and a manufacturer and that's really important to unlock the potential within our society and in turn interact and start to produce new ideas that we can start to showcase in our showroom and then push online further that process. One of the things that I've had to do as a company to grow is to hire new people. Take less time on the tools and spend more time trying to direct and coordinate production is how I've shifted that focus. 2015 I really started to look at my art practices and so one of my friends had a small space called Untitled Art Space in this space that I started doing my first art shows. Taking some of my knowledge of industrial design, fabrication and sculpture and bringing that into her shows. If I could give one piece of advice to students, it's really considering yourself as a whole. You have this whole life's experience that's contributing to your ability to do industrial design. Poor and after you leave school to maintain connection, you know. Those people you spent countless hours in the design studio with, like stay connected.