I experienced so much frustration with my design education — realizing that the institutions where we learn why or how to practice our disciplines are mainly interested in serving market forces. So much of our time was spent on creating elaborate marketing schemes rather than creating meaningful concepts that can open up conversations. Designing for the sole purpose of creating these so called “instagrammable moments” felt so wrong and unproductive. My frustration inspired a desire to explore a kinetic process that led me to gain insight on traditions that are quickly dying out. For me this was woodworking, but with an emphasis on hand tools. I wanted to learn and understand how to work with organic material without the convenience of machinery. If you pass organic material through machines that do all the work for you, how can you begin to understand the meaning of this material? This of course meant that “productivity” is much lower and I’m not able to crank out as many “products” as I potentially could, but what I learned was far greater. This journey was by no means easy nor did I achieve all the things I wanted to, but I learned something incredibly valuable — process. In a culture of convenience we are loosing the ability to handle conflict which terrifies me. Without conflict how can you learn? I have great admiration for all artisans and crafts people who have the discipline to work through frustration. If someone’s work is good, it’s because of all the effort they put in that no one ever sees. Japanese joinery is very special in that most of the hard work the carpenters put into their craft is not explicitly visible in the final result, but you can feel it within their structures. Let’s not focus so much on presentation, but what is being presented. Before I left my studio I arranged some of the things I was working on, including a collection of books that have been very meaningful and inspiring to me. I look forward to continuing my exploration of process, and hopefully this can lead to further conversations about doing things with intention.