As long as I can remember I have been a curious person. As a young child, I always found myself observing, questioning, and investigating the world around me. This curiosity has continued throughout my adult life as I experience different cultures, generational perceptions, and human adaptation. Curiosity has always led me to seek out “the how and the why” of my experience and this fuels my drive for discovery.

 As an industrial designer and as a design educator at SHiFT Design Camp and Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) I have had the opportunity to follow my inquisitiveness and to expand my knowledge of product design, rapid prototyping, manufacturing, client relations, teaching, and the complexities of higher education. These professional experiences have supported my growth and development since graduating from SCAD with a BFA in Industrial Design in 2013. Through my professional experiences as well as through my artistic practice I have recognized that I have a greater need and desire to continue my growth and understanding specifically related to how curiosity can help shape the future of art, design, communication, and education.

“Start with a verb when defining the problem statement,” was a phrase I often heard in design school. This helped me to broaden my cone of vision, and with the aid of research and data arrive at the root of the problem. It is easy to label the objects around us as nouns, but this becomes more difficult and abstract when looking at less concrete ideas or social and emotional constructs. For example, we all understand the use of a cup, but what is the cup providing? A way to contain a liquid, easily refillable, ergonomic for the user, and possibly a host of other actions. If we start the design process with a cup we will always arrive at a cup. Using a verb as the starting point will allow us to arrive at a solution that is more meaningful to the user. The example of the cup may seem overly simple, but as we start to look at more obtuse problems we can understand why phrasing the problem statement as a verb is such a powerful tool; especially for wicked problems like teaching empathy and compassion, or how to remove social stigma. Using the action or the verb allows us to as the right questions.

Currently, I am working on exploring the relationship between 3D printing technology and humans. As society progresses this interaction will become more and more normative. As the digital fabrication operations manager at SCAD I utilize, service, and maintain 50 machines. One machine in particular, the Stratasys J750, requires very specific maintenance and care that only I am able to provide due to my expertise and experiences. My daily caring for this sensitive machine and my curious tendency has led me to question the relationship between humans and all technology. In my on-going project, Robotic Emissions, which in current form is a written text, a narrator asks pointed questions about the quality of these types of relationships. Are these newly developing relationships appropriate? Are they healthy? What are the boundaries of these relationships? There is a speculative quality to the questions the narrator is asking such as does the mind-body dualism that we have learned from René Descartes occur in humans? It is with these questions that the reader begins to understand that in fact, the narrator is the machine. The reader experiences as the narrator posits these questions and follows the machine’s journey of seeking to understand the humans with which it interacts with.  Although Robotic Emissions currently exists as a written text, my intent is to develop the project further into an interactive installation. My vision for Robotic Emissions is that viewers are able to experience the journey of the machine and its questions through both the text and the physical artifacts that I collected over the course of a year while caring for the Stratasys J750.

Beyond design and art my passions include bicycles of any form, although I am a mountain biker at heart. Punk, sludge, metal or mostly guitar influenced music. I am an avid toy collector focusing mostly on 1/12 scale action figures and participating in Articulated Comic Book Art or for short ACBA and toy photography.

As of September 2020 I will be attending NYU in ITP. Follow me on any social media platform @phil_in_a_can.

-p