 Hi, welcome everyone to the final installment of the Alumni Career Pathway Series here at Emily Carr University. Emily Carr is located on the unceded traditional and ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Swaylatuth nations. I'm Shannon McKinnon, the Director of Career Development and Work and Career Learning here at Emily Carr, Today's panel is focused on industrial design and will be moderated by alumni Hunter Milroy. The Alumni Career Pathway Series is an annual three-part series which is sponsored by RBC and presented by Alumni Relations in Collaborations with Career Development and Work and Career Learning and the Schumpke Center for Creative Entrepreneurship. This series hosts alumni, panelists, and moderators who demystify career paths for current ECU students. I would also encourage you, please, to check in with the QR code on that sign over there, and you'll be entered to win one of three Opus gift cards. So, there you go, and you can take it away. Lovely, thank you. Can you hear me all good? Okay, perfect. We'll start with some biographies, some introductions for our panelists. We'll start in the end with Paula Torres. So Paula Torres is a designer residing in Canada originally from Mexico. She studied her Bachelor of Design at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, focused on industrial design. Her interests are directed on community development and programs aimed for a collective impact. Paula often works with clay, textiles, and organic materials which has developed a passion for ceramics, a functional curiosity in researching biomaterials and circular design. Then in the middle we have Toby Barat here. Toby Barat is a partner and designer at Propeller, a multi-disciplinary design studio whose work spans a range of disciplines from lighting and object design to sculpture and exhibition design. Common threads run through all of Propeller's work. An interest in the forms and systems of the natural world, a passion for creating useful and ecologically minded objects and experiences, and a desire to make work that will resonate well into the future. And finally close to me here on the right we have Herman Chan. Herman Chan is a designer, creative entrepreneur, and chair at IDSA Seattle. He has spent the past 15 years changing the future of aerospace, automotive, consumer retail, children's products, and healthcare. On his ongoing quest to hone his craft in building solutions that make positive difference, he has worked for companies such as Amazon, Boeing, and Seattle's Children's Hospital. Herman has also founded two startups and invented the Juno bassinet named on time's list of the 100 best inventions of 2021. As a graduate of Emily Carr Industrial Design Program, Herman looks to share his experience with the next generation of young Canadian designers. Thank you all for coming. I think we'll just jump right into it here. Our first question on the list, I feel like is a good starting off one. And I'll get you to start us off Herman, just because I feel like you've had a really, really diverse kind of career path, touching in a lot of these different areas as mentioned in your bio. Are there any recent or not recent career highlights? Anything that sticks out to you as like a milestone in your career, a shifting point for you? Yeah, I would say in my career I had the fortune of diving into aerospace and the future of retail. But I do feel recently getting into a place where I get to do more meaningful designs, things that matter to me. From building my own business and driving for better, more sustainable products, to working to invent the future of pediatric health care for children that are most in need. I think that's a huge milestone of achieving, doing things that, again, they make me feel valued and make an impact. For sure. Yeah. And then I'll move on to you Toby as well with kind of the flip side with like a very honed kind of career path with really pushing through this one thing over at Propeller Studios. Is there, would you say there's like a shift you noticed at any point in time just within the studio where you really saw yourself kind of launch into the direction that you wanted to see yourself in? More evolved than launch, I'd say. Okay. Yeah, we've been evolving from the beginning that's been our approach. Right from the beginning, I think when we were at Emily Carr, we actually didn't study in the industrial design department. We were in sculpture, my partners and I. Now my partner Nick and I both came to Emily Carr intending to go into industrial design, but we got totally seduced by the sculpture department in foundation and kind of recruited. And it was just so much fun because here at Emily Carr back then it was on Granville Island. In the sculpture department, we could be, you know, welding in the morning and printmaking the afternoon, doing some film at night. We just got our hands dirty and everything. And at the time we had a really great mentor here, a guy named Sam Carter, really, really wonderful professor. And Sam, we worked a lot with him. Whenever Sam had a big idea, he's like, let's turn that into an exhibition. So my partners and I worked on a number of exhibition design projects with Sam while we were here too, and that really influenced us. And so that's something that we carried through our practice. When we began, we started making furniture, eventually Feminich and lighting, but we were always coming up with ideas for exhibitions as well as a way to exercise our curiosity and also to kind of grow our skills in all of what, everything that's encompassed in designing an exhibition from spatial design to typography to writing, to collaborating with museum professionals. So I'd say like milestones, interestingly enough for me, I feel like because every four or five years we design a big exhibition, those have been kind of like the milestones. And in a way, even though they're tangential to our practice of designing and making lighting and other objects, they really help us kind of stretch and hone, stretch ourselves and hone our skills. And so like a recent milestone would be, we designed a show called Hide and Now for the Museum of Vancouver that was about the hide of culture. And the museum has a collection of 450 hide artifacts, and we, the exhibition actually brought these artifacts out and we worked with a fantastic young hide curator and designed this exhibition and it was like very, as you were saying, meaningful, right? Like when you have projects that are deeply meaningful where you can, you can really make some kind of impact that's tangible. So that show was really good for that as an act of reconciliation between the museum and museum culture and indigenous peoples. There's a fraught history there. A lot of what that show was doing was trying to heal a little bit some of those wounds and to also repatriate some of those artifacts back to Haida Gwai. So yeah, that was a big milestone for us. Yeah, that's great. I like you touching on or kind of switching the word there to evolution and there's a couple questions in here that I think we'll come back to, just we'll touch on it later, like the, how everyone, which I feel like is a big hurdle in design, how you continue to, everything you do, the next thing, how does that become an evolution of all the things you've done in the past? Oh, we're good. Okay. Yeah, so I think we'll come back to that in a later question here, but I think something that Paula, you can touch on for us, like as a recent grad, also this panel is really interesting because we kind of have like three generations of grads from Emily Carr, so there will be a plethora of answers to this question, but do you, coming out of Emily Carr and kind of being thrown into the world of professional design, what were the challenges that you faced when you were thrown into the industry and on the flip side of that, like what was something when you did find yourself looking at this big scary world of design, what was something that like excited you about where you could possibly see yourself going in the next, you know, five, ten years? Yeah, I think a challenge that I face, like this past months trying to like apply to multiple jobs and like having a lot of setbacks, it was that maybe like a lot of the industries were asking me to have really specific skills or like deeper information about something, and even though I don't regret my time in school as like trying a lot of practices and like working with different materials, maybe I would gain way more like confidence or abilities to fulfill like the expectations that were asking for me. So maybe just really soaked up that really like information from where are you applying and also as like now that I'm trying to continue my project, like my thesis project like a small company or like a small project, I think a lot of people outside from our practice, like maybe not designers, they do not appreciate all the process and work or effort that you put into like one single piece. So just like as a designer, we really need to advocate for our ideas and our work at the time of presenting it. And for now, like excited, I recently participated in the interior design exhibition this past month, and this is my second year participating. Last year I won the prototype competition, it was really great because it opened a lot of doors for me. And like this year I really try to like throw myself there and network. I know it's like something that everyone keeps saying like you need to make context or you need to talk to people. And but it does open a lot of doors for you. And like the collaborations that I'm doing right now, it's because I was able to showcase my work into like these really big spaces. And yeah, just I'm excited to keep working on my own things. For sure. Yeah, thank you. The next question is kind of within the same vein, which I think a couple like Toby and Herman, you guys can maybe answer this from either side. But if you were to give someone practical advice from someone who just graduated, they're looking to get into a similar industry as you, you know, from the application side or from the hiring manager kind of side, someone who has an established business who's maybe looking for a young designer to join their team, could you give any practical advice of what you'd be looking for in that person and what would be valuable to you and your business at the moment? Yeah, I guess our studio, I mean, we're, our work is specific, but we are sort of generalists in a way. And so everyone that comes into our studio is expected to be willing at least to work with their hands. That's a big part of it. Like we want people that have a little bit of experience, but definitely a lot of interest of learning how to make things. So it's important, of course, that everyone has the digital skills that are mandatory for being a designer and a human being these days. But we make things. So that's, you know, it can be a bit of a hurdle because as you were saying, like, you know, especially if you're trained as an industrial designer, I'm not sure how much time you guys get to be in the shop or in the studio actually making prototypes or, you know, working with your hands and learning, like, you know, okay, you can specify material when you're creating a piece in the computer, but have you worked with Elm before or Walnut, or do you know what it's like to bend aluminum, or have you ever talked to a powder coder or these things? So it's not what we, it's not what we demand of people coming into the studio, but we need, like, a big curiosity from people. And I think, like, that's kind of what we've always loved about our job is learning that stuff. And, you know, I'm getting pretty long in the tooth, but I go in every day and I try to learn and, you know, like I'm trying to wrap my head around AI. What is that going to do? But, yeah, so, I mean, in our studio, wood is a primary material, so we are looking for people that at least have a spark of passion for wood if they don't. And, you know, it's like, not everyone can be really good at working with wood or working with their hands. Maybe you find a different, maybe you're willing to gain that experience, but, you know, you find a different place in the studio that you fit into. So I don't know. I guess our studio might be atypical, but I don't think so. Like, I think you just need to be curious and able to learn is the biggest thing. For sure. You want to touch on that as well? Yeah, sure. My advice is networking and really, really strong problem-solving skills. You know, if you're going to work with a large consultancy or a big tech firm, it's not about just how pretty something is. I think it's in your portfolio is explaining why you did something. You know, what was the problem you were trying to solve? How was it successful and how did it meet the user needs? You know, the portfolio is that we tend to gravitate towards our, you know, have good strong form, but at the same time, really good clear articulation of the story behind why every feature, every function exists to solve that human need, grounding it. And I feel like the major differentiator with young professionals coming to a consultancy that is those that are really engaged and really take the time to network might be not your core strength of like being very, you know, out there, but like just really trying to find a mentor, trying to get in, being tenacious about it, even if there's no job constantly connecting with the companies that you're very interested in, because they say one day that job opportunity might come up and they'll think of you and you might get that call. And I would say that that did in the past work for me, getting my career start at Teague, having come from Emily Carr. For sure. I think another interesting thing that comes up is, or at least something I've experienced after leaving Emily Carr is when you have these kind of conversations with people who are established in the industry, or someone who's, you know, someone who you'd be interested in being hired by, but they maybe don't have a space for you, you know, and they use a lot of these words that you two just brought up like, you know, you need to be tenacious, you need to be creative, you need to be open, like easily teachable, all these things. I guess, and then a question that comes up for me after I hear those is, if I am all of these things, how do I show those to you in an effective way? So like, if you're looking for someone who's teachable, how do you find out that they're teachable? Where do you look for that trait? Like, can you find it in their portfolio? Do you need to meet them in person? Like, it's hard to kind of, if you have these traits, really know where to showcase them. So I don't know if you have felt the same thing. Yeah. Yeah, they ask for like, as you say, oh, that you need to be like really creative, but it's like, okay, but how do you know I'm creative? Like, if I'm not working with you at the moment. So, yeah, like, what are you looking for that in terms of? Yeah, it's almost like not even, it's like, we know what's being looked for. Where are you looking for it? Is it in the portfolio? Is it in these other places? It's kind of this bit of a dance that I feel like sometimes I'm trying to dance and I've got two left feet. Yeah, I know. It's hard. I think, I mean, it's actually why we started our studio. There was no place for us. There was no one to hire us. There were very few companies that were, I mean, okay, when we graduated in 1996, we all did our own things for four or five years and then we came together and we started because we knew we wanted to make objects for people's homes and spaces. We wanted to be involved in that, but there was very few, there was no botchy, there was no and, these companies are, they were still 10 years out. So we had to make it up. So, I mean, I really strongly believe that you have to have grit and you have to work on your portfolio and you should work on it all your life. Even while you're working for a propeller, you should have side projects going on where it's like you burn a little midnight oil to take your vision forward because I'd like to see more young people do what we have done. It's not, I won't tell you it's an easy path to forge that road for yourself, but it's like I want to see what you guys would create if you had your own studios, right? But now you have the advantage of there being, still a young design community, just from my perspective when I'm thinking about furniture and lighting and products and whatnot. It's still a small community of companies that you could work for here, but get your foot in the door and get in there and like Herman's saying, like you have to be tenacious and we haven't been able to hire that. I mean, we've kept our studio really small for on purpose because we like the culture of there being four or five people in the studio. It's really calm and it's productive and I never wanted to be a manager of many, many people. I want to design and make things, so we've kept our studio very small for that reason. The thing that I don't like about that is that there are wonderful young people that come to us and I don't have the capacity to hire them, but I do my best to point them to other studios and I do my best to teach them everything I can because when we were coming up like the people that we had worked for that we learned a bit from working in their studios. They didn't want, as soon as we went on out on our own, they didn't want to know us. They saw us as competition. It was a generational thing. You guys have grown up with open source culture in this different way of thinking about more, it's a more abundant culture, more sharing. Everyone's kind of realizing that, you know, we can grow the pie rather than trying to divide it into smaller and smaller pieces. That was a very rambling, roundabout way of saying that you just have to be tenacious. I know it's, your portfolio has to say a lot for you so you always have to make it better. I feel like Toby's a perfect case study. If I were to approach Toby, I would say this, you know, wealth of 20 years of experience in ID, how do I, I'm interested in lighting design. Like, I know I cannot work with him or his company because they're keeping it small, but the question to you as a problem solver is, well, how, he just said, like, I'm here to help. So, you know, could you do, can you just talk to him and say, hey, can I do it quarterly with you just to see where I'm at? Like, I think you'll find that in the industry, designers are really wanting to support young creatives. You just need to be open to reach out and work around their schedule and be consistently, when I say tenacious, be consistently there, like, you know, you don't just drop off after two meetings and you disappear, you know, like if you're constantly there, something might strike. And to answer your question is the, like, where you see solving a problem means having a really good process that is consistent across your portfolio. So, you know, big flags in a portfolio of, you know, one that has deep process, but all the other projects show not much concept development, don't show much prototyping or down-selection prototyping, is a huge flag. I probably wouldn't continue with it because there's going to be a lot of other candidates that show why they made that decision visually. And that's important because it shows that they're not stubborn. They're not stuck, like, that's the coolest thing. I'm going to go do that. But at least in our industry, like, you're not solving for yourself. You're solving for, like, a huge demographic of people and you need to understand what their needs are. And how are you going to go ahead and do that? And it has to be through process and this beautiful process that I think Emily Carr teaches, which is, you know, research, understand phase, ideation, you know, really develop the idea of refining and then deliver against it, right? And a lot of prototyping between. Yeah. Yeah. I think those are both very great points that's in kind of the past few months that I've been trying to, you know, rebuild my own practice and get back in there, you know, get a foot in the door. That has consistently come up. Like you said, it's like having every project have the same process and just having it be, like, so evidently clear what you're doing. Yeah, it's tough. Like, I mentor so many students and every time, especially in your second or third year, you're just trying to learn and documenting that process wasn't top of mind. Five projects going at the same time. That sucks. And so, like, my advice is like, ah, like, good thing, like you just described, you articulated well, but you didn't capture it. So I'm sorry, you either have to go back and try to get that work or redo it. And it's a lot more work to do it. But showing it will be helpful because you exit school with pretty limited portfolio and a lot of your peers have done the same problems. They all look very similar. How do you differentiate yourself, right? Yeah, definitely. I think this is maybe a good time to come back to that kind of question around evolution that you brought up earlier. And I'll keep it pretty open-ended and you can go with it where you might. But I think there's a, like I mentioned earlier, there's kind of this desire or maybe this expectation to having everything evolve from the previous thing you've just completed. You know, the next job needs to be bigger. The next company you work for needs to pay you better or even on a smaller scale like App Rappel or how do you, the next exhibition you do, how does it, how do you evolve? And in turn with that, with the process, how do you show that evolution? And so I'd be really curious to hear from all the perspectives. Maybe we can start with you, Paula, just with the work you've completed in university and stuff. Did you have any methods in place or did you figure out any methods by the time you got to the end of fourth year to learn from the previous project you've just done and make sure that you don't make either the same mistakes or you complete the same successes in the following project? Yeah, I mean, just a little bit of background. My thesis project was biomaterials. I developed, like, different recipes from organic recipes just like orange peels or spinach. And I made, like, garment pieces with them. And then, for example, like in the first exhibition that I was part from, I only show the material itself, like, oh, this is what I did. And I got a lot of feedback from either the judges or, like, people just coming by and asking, like, what is this thing? Like, I'm just seeing, like, colors, like, hanging there. So I think from where I evolve, it was really trying to showing them what I was capable of, and what the material was capable of at the same time. So I was just... I collaborate with workbench studio, which is in Gaston. And we, like, he told me, like, okay, you need to think about more of this other than just the textiles, because that was just my idea. Like, I just wanted to do textiles. But there were so many possibilities. And, like, right now, he and I are working to make, like, panels or, like, just dividers for, like, interior spaces. Or I did a couple of lampshades. Like, I'm still continuing with the garment part, but I think you... I was, as you say, maybe, Herman, like, I was really storing, like, this is my thing and I don't want to move away from this. But there is no improvement in your practice and, like, in your ideas, if you don't try things that maybe you are not willing to do. So just be we... Be willing, responsive to the ideas and the feedback that they, like, other people tell us. And also, like, be willing to share, because if they share, I think it's really nice to be, we say, procate with others. And, yeah, I think. Definitely. I mean, to further the evolution metaphor, there's natural selection in everything we do. It's, like, if we don't do a good job for a client, well, that's the end of us for them, right? And so we're always trying to evolve to understand our clients and the marketplace and our materials and our competition. And I'd say that's, like, we're not... That's not our strong point. So we're trying to evolve to become better at that. We, from the beginning, like I was talking to Herman, he said, wow, three creatives all together in one business. Like, how do you do it? Well, and we all studied, you know, in the same school, in the same program and everything. So it took us a while to evolve ourselves into different aspects of the business. And I can say, like, at first we just didn't have processes for everything because not having come up through other design studios where we could see people, like, see, hopefully, a functioning business or maybe even be fine if it was a really badly functioning business because you'd sit back and go, well, I wouldn't do it like that. You know, but we just didn't have any template at all. So not only were we trying to learn and evolve our design process, but we were trying to assimilate business functions and become decent marketers and stewards of the company's finances and all these things. For us, the evolution is ongoing. It's gonna... You know, it's never gonna be complete. There's always something. And that's something about being an entrepreneur, being a business person. Like, it's just never done. That's the exciting part. It's also the hard part. Yeah, I feel like my biggest... I was able to climb that corporate ladder, right? Like, industrial designer or junior industrial designer, senior designer, and eventually started my own companies and became an entrepreneur. For the reason that I'm always interested in constantly pushing myself to learn more and to create more impactful solutions that can change the world. And it's great that you have a lens of just design, but I felt that just being a consultant designer that advises companies, oh, this is the next big thing. A lot of times those things, when I see it go out, it doesn't change the world. And so I realized that you need to have a better understanding of marketing and business that kind of run the world and try to bridge that. And so I had the fortune of starting my companies and then eventually moving to Seattle Children's was an interesting kind of evolution, because you'd think after starting a company, I was considering joining some big tech companies as creative directors, so it's a very clear ladder. And I had a kumbaya moment where it's like, is this about, like, is this going to make me happier? Is this going to be what I really want? What looks good on LinkedIn? And what people think should happen? And I said, I asked, you have to dig deep in yourself and ask what do you really want and what's going to help you? And so joining Seattle Children's, I didn't become a creative director, I'm an innovation design strategist, but the work that I got to do, and it goes back to the original question, I was like, oh, I'm most proud to be able to do more meaningful work now because I had to kind of go through the different experiences to get there and kind of like put it back to like the audience, which is like if you're a young professional, I think how you'd apply that is instead of being headstrong on saying, oh, I must get this job, I must be like a junior designer, an industrial designer, that path, especially now, when industrial design and design is evolving rapidly and don't think too much about title and think about what that next role may help you get. It might not be your ideal dream, it might not be in the field or the expertise that you're looking to grow in, but if it's in UX or if it's in X, you will be able to extract, just getting your foot in the door and extracting those experiences to lean back to where you want to go is going to help define your career, right? Yeah, I think I had a, or maybe was in like a smaller scale version of this kind of similar move when you moved to Seattle Children's with when I got back to Canada a couple months ago and I had a similar thought of like, it's obvious, like you said, like the evolution for LinkedIn, the like what's the evolution on paper, but then also like what's the evolution for me and like what's the evolution for what I want to achieve in design and it might not be, you know, it might not be stepping up in a role, it might be like I need to step sideways in content, in what I'm designing and so I feel like I'm facing a similar thing where you get back and you obviously want to keep evolving, you know, what's next? I've done these two or three things here and there, what's next? The one on paper is the, like you said, junior designer, you know, you go on LinkedIn and the ones that say junior designer and you're like, that's what I want, but it might not be, it might not be wrapped up under the present of junior designer like the job you want could be called something completely different and yeah, I think looking past that was something I had to realize pretty quickly, which is a good point. This one, we'll get a little sentimental for a moment. I think this is like I said earlier with kind of like three generations of Emily Carr alumni here, I think there's going to be some interesting answers to this, but if you could go back and give your third year self a piece of critical advice, what would it be? You can take a minute to think, it's a bit of a bigger one, but yeah, if someone has one off the bat they can just jump in. Okay, sure. I think, like you should really soak up all the information you want regarding where you want to lead your crowd as a designer. Look out for opportunities like either inside or outside of school. Look out for cops, for internships and maybe, I think also as a designers we sometimes are a little bit hard on ourselves like judging our projects or criticise them like with really high expectations. But yeah, like you never know what's the project that is going to get you into the industry that you want. So just, I think, I don't know, when I was in school I worked a lot of with the Shumka Centre and I really tried to cultivate those relations that I did in the process and at first I didn't think they were important but now having those contact or just like those persons to go back and ask them for advice or just even talk about random things, it doesn't need to be about design. It's been really helpful and I think also another part is that I regret sometimes not believing in my judgment or in myself. It's always important to be confident of who you are as an individual and as a designer. I know sometimes you might think, oh this is the worst design I've done, I don't want to do this presentation. But it really says and helps a lot if you present it, like the best project that you're going to do. So yeah. I want to rift off of you. I think it's a really great point, Paula. Like if I would do my advice to the third year is like who cares about third year or who cares, take five years at school. I would prioritize getting internship any day, especially with the company, because that's your opportunity to leverage your student and get actual real professional network experience and graduate later, not with your alumni but you know, it's not about that. I think it's if you can look for, I would say a lot of successful students come out with, from different schools come out with portfolios with actual big names like Herman Miller and like all these things that they can show. So that is already one upping you know the rest of the field, the competitors. So I think to be competitive you need to do the same. And I think it goes back to like what I said it was a it was a struggle. I kicked myself in the butt so many times because I did not document or keep my process and redoing it is easier said than done. It's brutal and I did not redo it most of it. So I didn't have the I think that I think my portfolio would have been even better because I had all the stories with me. It just yeah. Diving back into the archives is not an easy task for sure. Yeah. I really like what both of you said. I fully agree. I would say really lean into collaboration. That there is so much strength there. That's like and whether you like it or not that's what your future is. It's collaboration. I I taught a workshop at another design school in the city recently and the students were broken up into groups and I watched the group dynamics of this collaborative process and there was only one group out of five that collaborated in a way that I recognized as a proper collaborative process. This is I know like when you're at school sometimes it's really hard to work in groups but this is what the future is going to look like for you. You're going to be on teams. You're going to have difficult clients. You're going to have clients that set your really hard brief and you work your tail off and then they don't answer the phone for a month maybe and then all of a sudden they're like where is it? All this kind of stuff is going to happen in your professional career so think of yourself as like an architect a film director think of these professions where you have to rely on lots of other people that's what a designer has to do it's not just you. I have to say I think you nailed it. A designer is a catalyst. Everything revolves around you like engineering revolves around you like the product management, the business guys they revolve around you because you're building the idea you're representing fundamentally the user that's using it and what they need that's like no one else is doing that but you need to be able to communicate and bring everyone together to deliver against your vision and so collaboration communication that's the skills that you need to be successful yeah all great points for sure I think we'll go back to you Toby this is kind of a specific question but I feel like it jumps off some of the stuff you just talked about there's especially when you this is at least my experience when you got to fourth year and people are kind of looking over that horizon saying the end is near where are we going next the discussion inevitably comes up of starting a studio and it's always kind of like a murmur underneath underneath everything else because it's scary and I think especially starting it right out of school do you I think it would be really helpful to hear advice from you especially coming from starting with three core people from the same program at the same school starting the studio basically like the do's and don'ts are things you realize really quickly just by doing and taking that leap and starting Propeller yeah kind of what it was like building a studio almost right out of school it was an experiment it was an experiment because as I said before we didn't have a template we did know some really great creative people but they're all in disparate fields right so we drew on those relationships but I think going back to the what would I tell myself then that I know now big one is just don't try and reinvent every single wheel yourself so you've got to get out there and talk to people and maybe like Herman and I were talking at the beginning like if Propeller had brought on a business partner along with the three creatives it didn't seem possible and we didn't even know to do that at the beginning but if we had brought on a business partner in the beginning it would have sped our evolution radically how do you work with two colleagues that you've studied with well there has to be a deep respect and friendship goes a long way and you have to nurture that right you've got to make sure that this thing doesn't rupture meaningful friendship and that's a powerful tool for creating a process that's respectful for everyone that's involved and then I'll move to a specific question for you Herman and it's kind of about your involvement as chair at IDSA and I mean if you could speak a little bit about just what that is for you and how your role kind of fits in there as well as something that I feel like for me needed to be demystified a little bit as a student at Emily Carr was these organizations they pop up here and there throughout your education and like they've all got these acronyms like IDSA and all these things and you're like what are these things I don't know what these organizations are and so how would you recommend young designers to interact with these organizations like IDSA like how do you seek them out how do they understand what they are and just either get involved or yeah basically just how to interact with them yeah so IDSA Industrial Design Society of America I'm the board member and chair currently for the Seattle chapter I've been running that for almost four years so it's two your terms and really the I remember IDSA like back when I was in Emily Carr it felt very disconnected it was like base as Seattle it felt like but they technically represented Vancouver too and it felt like we didn't get much time and day from them and I think that was that's number one now running the show is very tough to be a nonprofit organizer on your own time to try to plan events number one is tough and in doing it not in your own locale has been even more challenging so I would say that's also why IDSA was IDSA Northwest a year ago and now it's just IDSA Seattle is honestly just focused on Seattle or at least the Bellingham to that whole area and how do you best leverage it is number one is that for our local chapter you don't need to be a member I think there's perceptions like oh I have to be a member in order to access these events for our chapter we do not require a membership what we strive to do is create especially coming from the pandemic to create a more inclusive community we felt during the pandemic when I started joining it was just like I think designers are somewhat social we live and breathe design and it's healthy to talk to each other and that's what we should be we should be a way to bring people together that's what we tried to do during the pandemic we had at Seattle chapter we just tried to do a lot of online sessions we worked with Rhino who showed us the new tools we worked with Keyshot who gave a free license to Keyshot and showed their new tools and we did a lot of education series in fact we had Katie Ma who was at that time Arcterix one of the climbing designers she was one of the design teams there and she spoke so I was trying to bring in Vancouver designers to speak to again not just Seattle but those that were available online now what are we doing we're doing more in person events so I do recommend those from Vancouver to join I know it's a far track but if you join these Seattle has a great dynamic design community designers from Microsoft through to smaller consultancies like Tactile Teague Philips Design is there REI is there so there's a huge and so everyone including students go perfect time to network so that's how I would take advantage is if you can make the track join the events and network yourself and get yourself out there awesome that's unfortunate they've just collapsed down to Seattle like you said probably hard reaching reaching over the border with all of their events and stuff similar kind of bridge but we'll open it up to everyone are there any or what are some good resources professional affiliations stuff like IDSA, social media accounts anything that you recommend to follow anything that helped you at really any point whether when you were in school after for networking purposes or just to something to keep inspiration I follow a bunch of people just so I can watch what they make and I'm like that's so cool helps me stay creative to start us online Paula yeah when I was at school I did it in a cop with a company or corporation to take all ISM arts and culture the founder is Scott Mallory I know his work with him like hard a couple of times for like the TEDx talks he's a really great resource like when I was on his team we worked for we partnered with a company called Spectra you might know it's like this Jogga app that has like a triangle we were creating like BR immersive spaces and like for me it was like just mind blowing I was quite good at like training modeling but I didn't like working with it but I know it was something that it was like I got an opportunity to take and I really appreciate how he advocates for students and he guided me and others in my team like it was me it was a great year and then it was like some two other formasters like really from different areas and from UXUI and like he really trust our points of views and our opinions and like giving us this big positions on like big projects that maybe others want because we're students we'll see in the process of learning and it's like pushing you out there and be like you can do this and in terms of like social media accounts like if you want or if you're interested in biomaterials like we're working like as I did there's a website called materialarm.com it has like a bunch of recipes and it was like a bunch of researches from ultra university and like there's a lot of universities in Europe and it's like open source and Instagram's account there's like fablab which office courses some of them are free some of them are not but I've took I think two so far and like pretty accessible like student budget and fabricating me and bio design that those are also Instagram accounts wow I want that list yeah I don't know we don't belong to any organizations per se I think partially because we came out of the studio program and then we sort of became industrial designers and we work back and forth between art and design we never really found a home in that respect but I guess like our home is really like our clients are largely interior designers and architects and developers so we're constantly networking within those communities and there are lots of less after the pandemic but there are you know meetups and evenings and lecture series and all that stuff is starting to come back and it's important but for me personally it's like I just love you you know I can be watching some old dude who is like a master wood turner at lunchtime while he's eating my lunch or I can lately I want everyone to know about Theaster Gates he was just the most amazing artist out there right now he works out of Chicago Theaster Gates look this guy up what a practice what an inspirational practice what a maker what a community builder just incredible I'm always looking for artists and designers and scientists who are doing cool things that get my mind firing and make me want to go back in the studio yeah I'd say be active on LinkedIn or build your LinkedIn account you're entering into the field follow IDSA Seattle we do have an upcoming event January 11th so it's be a really big panel with some of the very old designers that have shaped design in Seattle and that's hosted by Steve Kaneko Steve Kaneko was the first industrial designer at Microsoft he's been working with designs and surface and all the design ID teams working with him I do think also kind of like who you should follow is actually your own peers I know that right now you're in school and they technically are your competitors because you might be applying to the same job so what you're going to find later on in your career is that that is your network that is going to move with you like they work with each other you know and yeah I think yeah that's a great point for sure I think huge huge leverage point and one of those ones that like it doesn't come up until it comes up and then you're like all of a sudden you know some guy you met in third year hits you on a message on LinkedIn and you're like oh my gosh and then something grows out of that you know so yeah that's feels like it lays dormant until it comes up and then it's really useful immediately so it's a great point and then kind of one more for Toby and Paula but the you with your with your grad project and you know kind of continuing it after and then as well as like you said before earlier with kind of defining what Propeller does as a studio I find a lot of the time you know there are very few there are very few designers that are creating that's that are saying you know this is UX design and that and they like slap that label on and they feel comfortable with it so you kind of bridging bridging the gap or or working in between sculpture and design and then you kind of like with biomaterials and like also kind of dipping into food almost how do you how do you explain properly or present your designs as and you know do them justice as as to how you want them to be seen to other people who walk up to like you said you know walk up to your project and are just like I have no idea what this is like explain it to me I think document tension I think for my stuff specifically like if you just tell them oh I cook spinach and then you have this textile it's not like a really good explanation so maybe just like really explaining like for my experience in the exhibition they were asking for like every single ingredient that was in the recipe or like the process the drying process of it I used it how like much did last so I felt like before I didn't thought about that process I was like well in my mind make sense but for someone else it doesn't and yeah I mean I think sorry I just my mind sorry it's kind of sounds like you're like especially with your project it's so complex and it does dip into all these areas at different points throughout the process so like really you know no pun intended boiling it down to like these are the four steps and simplifying it so that you don't overwhelm them with all these different steps and then they leave and they still don't really understand what it is and how you made it yeah I like what helped me a lot of it was like oh it's like if you were just making a soup like you're just cooking and then you're putting this into your mouth and it's your cake like this is like the process of how it is and also like talking to maybe people in chemistry or like in the biology practice it was like pretty interesting then like some of them were just asking me like how do I paste it or like but for example like this it was like this I don't remember his name but he was in the interior design exhibition and he works for BioLove if I'm not wrong but what this company does is you basically go and you give them your project and your product I mean and like they test it for like every single thing how it reacts to heat, how it reacts to water like how it reacts to the weather and like how it's gonna last so it's for them to test like sustainable products and he really was interested just even if I left my piece outside or like or if someone were like if the if I were like human liquids or like yeah it was gonna like the textile so just having like two different perspectives like I've never thought of like people asking me like oh can I eat it or can I just try to like use it for like certain hours and run and like see how it reacts to my sweat like yeah so yeah just like interest to see other perspectives from a different angle from other people and I guess you continue to present this project you wonder you probably get a pretty good handle on when I'm explaining this project to a chemist I'll explain it like this when I'm explaining it to a designer I'll explain it like this and so yeah maybe it's a little bit of knowing your audience knowing what they want to hear when I was telling my parents they were like oh you're making like a spinach shirt like like why am I paying like so much money to the university if you're making a spinach shirt so yeah you really need to know your audience as you know like you're saying yeah I think it's it's another skill but it's a huge one that if you can manage to get on top of it writing just being able to write about what you do is a superpower like like you were saying Herman of documenting process and showing that visual representation if you can actually articulate what you're trying to do and pull in all the threads of design history art history science whatever the heck it is that led you to where you are that's like really powerful and it's not easy like you know increasingly as humans in any discipline we have to be so well-rounded like gone is the day where you can be the person just sitting in the cubicle doing the same thing in and out every day right for better or for worse I think it's for better and AI is going to help with this too but kind of going back to resources like I just being the old dog who has sketchbooks and I fill up sketchbooks with ideas and thoughts and drawings and whatnot and I've got a stack of them and I don't know where that drawing was that I'm thinking of that I know I did ten years ago and how the heck you know or ideas that I've written down that are just lost in sketchbooks so recently my partner Pam said there's this thing called day one or one day or whatever it's like a journaling app and she's like you need to start using that and I'm like I don't need not a journaler I'm not doing that but I fired this thing up and I realized oh my gosh like if I had been this had been my sketchbook for the last 20 years with all the tagging ability and whatnot like I just love it because as you move through your career there are going to be threads that started right here in art school of interest and proclivities and directions and those are going to weave their way throughout your career they're going to pop up someday like you're going to be working like 15 years from now on some important project and something that you thought of or started working on in art school is going to pop up you know and anyway I find that app super amazing because I can chuck my drawings into it I can just write I can have some thoughts that I tag so that I can go back and every time I hit that tag there is what I've been thinking about and I can see how it's been evolving for two months at this point but it could have been 20 years anyway I think writing is how we bridge the gap between art and design and explaining it to our clients you have a vested interest do you have because I'm sold no royalties you're making royalties I wish I did because I love it but no I don't feel free to touch on this as well with your yeah 100% yeah I was just going to move to the last one which is just a kind of general closing thoughts is there anything you wish you could tell your students self you want to tell these students self yeah just any kind of closing thought about your practice and how you kind of ended up where you were yeah being a student is great really take advantage of that like I took a lot of like electives here in school and that has really helped me to like have different knowledge so maybe it was not related to my major it was like it's something that has helped me or allowed me to stand out in like interviews or like just to applying to jobs and I mean for example when I took a class here that it was professional practices and I took it with Laura Kosak and she told me that I needed to like she give me this assignment where I needed to interview someone who I admire in their practice and I interview this person and like now she's my boss like we made like a really great connection I didn't talk her like for two years after that but when I noticed that she was like asking for someone for her studio to help her like I was just like oh hello and she was like oh you're Paula you interview me like she already knew who I was and like my my practice and like she has looked into my portfolio so yeah like I never thought just by interviewing this person in a class I was able to get a job so even though I was applying to a lot of them none of them call me and just like out of nowhere she already knew me so that was a really good experience and from school so yeah I think just really take advantage of what school offers you at the moment and as Herman said like it doesn't matter if you graduate in four years or three years or I actually switch major street times before I reaching to industrial design so just having that background and that experience like those up and downs helped me to like narrow my options and like knowing what my true passion was yeah awesome thanks I've sort of forgotten what the question is anything you wish you could tell your past student self or closing thoughts because we're open to the audience after well I mean propeller propeller is propeller's client a lot of the time so we're designing we're giving ourselves design briefs and coming up with products that we're testing against the market and and I would say so sometimes like there is we understand our user we're trying to and the design you know is really responsive to that but or we're trying to be but we're also trying to use our imaginations and our creativity to to design something new and fresh and I think what I've learned and what my partners and I struggle with every day is to be as weird as we can be like we don't allow ourselves to be very weird like we started Freaky Fridays now where it's like the thing is okay no no email after 10 o'clock and let's make sure we do something different you know let's pursue something weirder because every time we not every time when we go out on a limb and we do something weird we either fall flat on our face and we learn a lot from that and sometimes we spend a lot of energy doing that but that's okay and sometimes it's like wow people are that resonates with people that's interesting because it's and I think like in this moment where human creativity is now being challenged by AI I think like we have to lean into our strange individual perspectives or dig deeper into our cultural histories and just not be afraid to be a little bit weird about that yeah my question is back to you why did you join industrial design why did you do this and I think you always need to ask yourself that question if it's to again solve problems to make an impact to drive change for whatever you feel is for the positive I can tell you the word of encouragement when you get into this industry you'll love it I know very little designers that don't become state designers because the amount of impact you're going to have for you know others like the people that you touch is incredible but that path is non-linear and that's where never be stuck on what is next and what you must get and be open to like hey I'm going to achieve this like your story is about problem solving and creating opportunities branches that open up for you to reach what you came to do so I think again that word of being tenacious and resilient and just drive home like make big change but and yeah like it's going to be non-linear and be okay with that it's your story awesome thanks guys yeah we'll open it up to the audience questions sure you can start right here yeah so I've actually got a few questions as design consultancy like owners like starters how do you compete with like the best how do you compete with like Herman Miller or being able to innovate or getting up there in the design world how do you put your name out there yeah it's I guess we've we've never really looked at it that way we've just we kind of competed against ourselves is how we've seen it we've always sort of felt like wow we could be so much better than we are like every I think it's just a constant thing in our studio it's just like really we did that well it seemed good at the time but man we could do a lot better so let's keep going and we did that you know that's kind of how we got got ourselves off the ground but we've also really benefited from a change in the culture in our industry where you know when we started when we started 15 years ago on the trajectory that we're now because we've been going for 20 years for the first five years we're doing a little bit of everything trying to figure out where we where's our niche right but when we first started out it was the era of the internet when there were blogs and our work just bounced around we were really lucky we were just at the right place at the right time and we had you know some lighting pieces in off-site shows in New York and San Francisco and our work would bounce around the internet and designers interior designers would call us up from Dallas or New York or whatever and we're selling work into the states and we got us going but it was really frustrating here in Vancouver because all of the local designers they wanted to specify Italian lighting in their projects and you know there was like one project where we got our foot in the door it was a big public project and it just got scuttled at some point and my partner Pam just called up and this is maybe the first bold thing we ever did was just like I need to meet with with the head architect of the company and we went in and we just said look this is a public space in Vancouver why are you bringing in European lighting for this space we proposed this great project like give us a shot right and they did and that helped and then then the culture started to change where suddenly local is the thing and now like having a studio where our interior designer architect clients can send their clients to come down our wood shop our shop is in the back our design offices up front is up top you know they come in and they see it like oh you're the person that's making this is made right here this is really powerful it's part of the story that we can tell to leverage our value in the market because for me like the way I see industrial design at core is a business so no matter what I feel like I would want to I mean you know it's your consultancy but no matter what I would try to aim for like the best I would try to innovate you know yeah and then I've got a question for you about your your sorry sorry your your clothing how would you describe that to like a company or people that would want to manufacture that like how do you prove that what you're doing is worth it because I feel like when you join a consultancy there are a lot of limitations for cost manufacturing how do you go proving that your idea is worth it yeah like during my four year my mentor was well I had Keith but I also had Sophie I forgot her last name but yeah Garth but I think she really got me to understand that what I was trying to sell or what I was trying to communicate to others it was something really imperishable and like really try to embrace that it was a product that it was gonna disappear at some point and you know right now we have a lot of problems with like pollution and plastic and like my textile is not a solution it's just an alternative that you can use really proposing it like that like I'm not trying to sell like this really big problem of climate change right here like I'm just trying to help and for them to see like the beautiful part of things are are gonna be they're not gonna last for a long time and I think yeah like as I mentioned early when I was talking to like this chemistry guy he really was trying for me to also research about how I was getting the other ingredients like to create this textile so really researching like the whole blueprint that I was trying to communicate here so just from what I was getting the glycerin or what I was getting the spinach so just giving the whole big picture of the process I think it was pretty important for to me and like right now I know in like for example in Europe like biomaterials has been like a big thing for a long time but here in Vancouver it's like pretty new and more in Canada so I think also presenting this as something new in that it might help but in the future it helped me and yeah okay thank you we can go next okay do you guys have any specific advice for working with other people like collaboration having conflicting ideas coming in and different visions and how you actually work around getting to a final product about well obviously there's going to be some conflict along the way but making that conflict constructive and finding your way to that finished thing yeah I think it's really knowing what your problem is that you're solving if it's very abstract then there's going to be a lot of opinion involved of like oh well mine's right but if you've got a really great problem statement that's divine clearly then that will help the next thing often when I'm designing is I do a requirements matrix so like what is a must have like if this requirement doesn't exist this will not work you know it has to have a screen or digital input and then from that matrix in the middle it's more nice to have options but that may make this very innovative and then there's a really truly like optional and because you tiered your requirements there's a lot less debate if your solution doesn't meet X requirement then they're not on the same level so you need to mitigate those risks early on because obviously conflict in ideas will always happen and it isn't he says she said or like you could battle out you could but usually start with strong requirements that's yeah that's really good just having like those concrete down so you know what's going on I would just be interested also in working in a smaller studio with a few people how that happens yeah it again it had to evolve my one partner Nick and I we started collaborating in second year of art school and by fourth year almost everything we made was a collaboration and at that time the sculpture or the fine arts department we were a bit of a novelty because no one else was working that way in the fine art department not as a regular collaborative team so we just had this chemistry right off the bat and we had the same ideas that you know balanced each other well and then we brought our third partner and Pam and we had to learn how to all three of us work together and a lot of that was kind of coming to similar conclusions like we didn't we didn't have like a design process in the beginning that gave us that foundation and that way to talk to each other but we eventually arrived at so that really helps and then I think the biggest thing is just like for me I liked being right a lot I really I still like being right but I'm less into it now than I was took me a long time and so like what from for me and for all of us is like getting to the point where what you like is a really good outcome and if you're a team if you know if the crucial ingredient comes from your partner it's like that's cool like just set up a culture in the in the studio where the best idea can surface and and experiment a lot thank you so this is a question for Ermin so how did you enter the pediatric healthcare industry were there like other qualifications or experiences that you needed and another question is like what exactly do you do and can you describe like maybe a specific project yeah good questions so I know a lot of healthcare designers I'm a healthcare designer you see my portfolios aerospace retail tech and so it wasn't something that I was immediately looking for I think the opportunity rose where I was with my network and having my own consultancy we had consulted for Seattle children to help them launch the innovation team and and so we had exposure and a good connection to start with and what is that team well pediatrics kids healthcare is a very under looked or underserved environment a lot of the big businesses it's not very profitable to invent for kids it's very niche and that doesn't mean that they should get less of a care a lot of solutions are adult solutions are adopted for children and that doesn't lead to great care in fact it leads to safety and risk so from my understanding there's not much innovation teams pediatrics healthcare so maybe we're one of the first and it stems from the what's called the continuous improvement innovation team at Seattle children's that was launched to help the hospital or the organization because seven different organizations but like to really be the leaders of pediatric healthcare in order to do that you need to do it through improvement and innovation so build a team on it what do I do it's a very lean team I think and it's being a problem solver motivated to see the real problems at the hospital and I think that's a very unique opportunity a lot of businesses I was telling Toby like a lot of businesses stem from technological innovation and once they have a cool new tech that might solve this they try to you know jam it into the healthcare system it might make change but I think what's really super unique is very little do you get designers seeing the real need by nurses by doctors by the children and you start seeing a pattern where there's a huge opportunity to improve this and that there actually is dedicated designers and engineers to go in and solve it you know you're we're at the core of it and that's why I do is I don't think it's a junior position because it requires you to I'm developing UX like I'm doing digital innovations to physical innovations it's doing anything and everything to make some to build out platforms or ideas we are not funded in a way that we can take those innovations straight to market especially those clearing FDA requirements those are five-year long development cycles they cost millions but what we are doing is testing and creating these solutions that are making changes within the hospital and hopefully one day we take those learnings and we can have that we will own that IP and try to sell it or work with partners to then change all of healthcare through that type of like you know start small nurturing into bigger greater platforms and projects where I don't know how much I can say but we're looking at projects that are looking at racial biases of products that have been designed that have proven to be racially biased because you have a darker skin tone and we're looking to solve those problems so it's really big problems not just at the children's hospital level where I can say this probably like we work with Microsoft and they have an inclusive tech lab you should check this out Bryce Johnson runs this and he I think you'll see he has a bunch of talks he was the co-creator of the Microsoft adaptive control you know gain controls they're designed for if you have a left hand and a right hand and you're very mobile but not most people like there's actually quite a huge demographic that controls don't work that way and so there's a whole team at Microsoft figuring out what that future might be including Logitech and actually they work together but we're also working with them to figure out what the few how do you make the future of gaming more accessible to those that just aren't the typical human right yeah any other questions in the back this is kind of a general panel question excuse me I was wondering for all three of you what was a very pivotal moment in your career or in your design practice design philosophy that was that really boosted your kind of your design practice in general and your career wise was there any specific event experience or mindset change that like prompted such a big change in your personal careers yeah for us it was very early on I'd say like 2005 we just decided that we were going to work as sustainably as possible which at that time was a little harder to understand what that looked like we knew the basic things that we needed to do I think we basically realized that we were moving into an industry in a sector of economy that could be propelled by fashion or trends and we just kind of got grossed out pretty quickly and we're like okay how can we make you know good work here that we can feel good about and yeah we landed on that as like a reason for making what we made and then we turned it into an exhibition we we one of the first things we did is we partnered with like a little festival in town sustainability festival in 2006 and 2007 and we pitched to them the idea of having a show about sustainability and design and we brought in 30 objects from around the globe by designers that were taking different approaches to creating sustainable products at the time and that show ran in three different venues over three years and it was like just a great education for us because we were like just trolling the internet looking for people that were making cool things and then we just email them and we're like we've got an exhibition and we want your piece and these are all our questions right so we used the exhibition to give ourselves an education now you guys are I mean this is a big part of your education now I imagine it's sort of like taken for granted that we need this is our big responsibility or one of them as designers but at the time it was a great reason for us to move forward I think it was my the biggest moment was my graduate project you know I told you it would be amazing to get internship I knew that at fourth year I was like I need to work with a company so I was very lucky to just trying to constantly network and it was actually through a professor here at Keith Schaplan he connected me with Teague who was then my poor and that was pivotal to me but that journey to do it was very it wasn't targeted it wasn't like oh I'm going to do it my graduate senior thesis I wasn't going to redesign the redesign the airplane laboratory because of Teague it was just like oh that's a shitty problem and so I focused on that and just so like my big break was Keith then connected me to Wing Yutani who was very pivotal at Teague of like building out that aviation studio who is often times the hiring manager that pulled in designers and I and through and showing him and with my also partner like so we had a our senior project was two designers working on the same project there at the laboratory because we kept on interfacing with him it led me to the role but again it was not linear I exited and I was like hey Wayne do you have a job for me? He's like nope and I was like ah so I went to do call center work at Rogers Wireless it felt pretty hopeless actually for a period because I didn't get a job and I just didn't feel there was getting any traction there was form 3 here and there was very little studios so I knew I had to go out and just wasn't sure how and so I actually took the safe way I applied for my masters in architecture I was like through industrial design I'm going to do architecture and I had told Wayne this ah I can't find anything I'm going to go to architecture and he's like oh wait I think I might get a job for you and he pulled me in and it was really funny my first day at Teague all the managers were surprised they're like that's weird I thought we only hired one person why is there two Asian guys and it was Wayne kind of just he gave me a big break he pulled me in and gave me a chance and yeah forever thankful for that for me I think like the first day that I participated in the exhibition I didn't really talk to anyone like I just put my project there and I was like I don't want to like continue with it I was really just burn out from it like it was a lot but then this year I was like okay I'm going to just talk to them and like do what they think about it and I actually met this um he's a Colombian designer his name is Juan Socaras and he was part of like the fashion week this um I think it was like two weeks ago and um yeah he was like oh Paula you just come and like work with me like I think you have like a good eye and you know like you have experience with sewing and he just needed like someone here based in Vancouver because he was coming like all the way from Colombia to like showcase his work in the fashion week um so yeah I think even though I did wanted to like focus more in ceramics other than just like textile so like biomaterials it was like really great to have this other experience of being in the fashion industry um and that's really like pivoting for me like okay maybe ceramics it's not the thing that I might want um so yeah like just talking to people it's like you get a lot from it yeah um cool um I just want to first off start by saying thank you for you guys for taking your time coming in and sharing your insight and my questions kind of similar to now's um to try and take a peek at all of your works and they're all beautiful um and like after graduation when you lose the accessibility to like facilities and all that did you find that you had to kind of like pivot a bit and see like work in different ways through your style and um yeah and how comfortable were you with that with that change yeah um yeah like the facilities here are really good just like having access to the wood shop um but for me like for ceramics I know there's a bunch of studio around like Vancouver but it's kind of expensive um but I there's this I don't know if you call it a studio but it's called Mad Lef um and it's like on Hastings Sunrise and I you either get like a spacer for like your own things you can pay for the space and then you have access to like they have wood shop they have ceramics they have like a loom for textiles um they have like laser cutters and like just like a mini Emily Carr I'll say because actually like the prison um it was three students I think one it was from Ontario and the other two work from Emily Carr and like created this it's been for like a while I think um so yeah I think it's good just to have that space and for example like I know some of our classmates like Nolan and like Luca like they're creating like their own thing and they're because um if you want to get access to like all these machines from the wood shop of course it's expensive to like purchase them yourself but if you get like a group or be like okay I have um the sewing machine and I have like the um I don't know like laser cut it or like a treated printing or something just like getting together as a group um but yeah yeah I I mean I feel guilty I had it easier than you guys because Vancouver when I went to Emily Carr was not insanely as expensive as it is now so my my partners and I took up a studio in second year um a big unheeded rambling cool place that we you know a lot of artists and designers who came in and out of there everyone had a little bit of space and we had a common shop where we pooled our we got a shitty table saw and we you know we just started cobbling stuff together and everything had to come off of those tools in the beginning um so so it was easier and I really kind of worry like a little bit about that that model is kind of gone for you guys it sucks um but in the meantime up have sprung like you know maker labs and and these various uh ways of sharing um and that that's you can you can do that and you can also just like it start designing for the suppliers that are out there there's laser cutters and there are metal fab people powder coders and anodizers and like all those people again like when we started 15 20 years ago those people didn't want to work with us they were used to making stuff for fishing boats and you know logging extraction and we go in like we're creating this this light and it's we want you to spin this part you know like what and you want 20 of them like no go away so but now that's changed because the because people are making things here and because those extractive industries are dying if not dead um there's a transition of industry towards but we don't what we don't have is what they have in Europe right like if you're in Italy you you could go to the town that like has legs for tables and then there's the town that that spins metal and there's you know they've got that right but we also have the opportunity here to create that so you guys could be part of that is that the name of the town like in translation like only does like for tables I don't know if my answer is really relevant at TIG we're spoiled like there's industrial design team but it's completely supported and there's there's a build team so in when you design airplanes you have to we build it in full scale um I guess maybe most people don't know that but like yeah and so there's actually full prototyping facilities so as a designer like there's actually different pathways maybe that's relevant is if you're a really hardcore builder and like creativity is cool but you rather like figure out how something's built there actually is another role called a technical designer at TIG where we will envision what the different architectures might be we'll hand it off and then we'll have a whole team two teams one team that 3D models it and builds it and makes it realistic renders and then another team that will build different mockups and figure out how do you how do you get this up like in full scale and they'll do all the details and we have engineering team that does all the engineering of it just like like for me I use a lot of like Rhino and like Modo so if you want to I know it's expensive to purchase like a license but it's better to do it as a student because they have a student discount so for example for Rhino I purchase my license and then I have like this student price for like home life so just just buy everything before you are not a student yeah I'll just touch on one last thing which is like I like how you brought because there are people that everybody has different interest in design and like those people that are very like architectonic and like very mechanical the real like builders this might apply less to you but one thing that I found that I kind of actually enjoyed when I was I was taken out of Emily Carr and I had a job immediately with a place that had a full wood shop that I could access on the weekend I needed to so that was the option so I kind of was spoiled for that but since I've been back and since I've left there having nothing is almost it's a little like freeing because I have this interesting idea that I could make in a wood shop in two days if I wanted to but I'm like how can I make this with nothing or like how can I make this out of garbage and so you know I have like you have this idea for a chair where you're like I can whip this up in a wood shop in eight hours maybe I'll learn how to like weave willow branches and make it out of that maybe I'll learn how to make case in glue there's all of these ways you know we haven't had wood shops for 30 million years, however long we've been alive and people have figured out ways to do other things so I think I would say before you go calling to maker labs just embrace it a little bit see what you can do and then go to maker labs yeah I think we're out of time for questions we'll wrap it up here now we're going to wrap it up and this will give you all an opportunity if you want to have just one of one ask some questions come say hi oh and make sure that you check in using the QR code so that you can win one of an opus card right? we've got three opus cards you could win one and we're going to ask a very free full survey like three questions and just wow thanks so much this was great this was really fun thanks thank you