Teaching is a multi-faceted undertaking. Every semester holds the potential to provide a set of challenges never experienced before. After nearly thirty years in the classroom, I still find each semester frequently presents itself as if it were my first, and that is precisely what I find so engaging about it.

One of the most persistent challenges in teaching design is resisting the impulse to be an art director. As a practicing designer who frequently guides more junior designers, the instinct is to tell students directly what needs to change. As a design educator, you must commit instead to the slower, more demanding process of guiding rather than giving direction, so that students build their own understanding of the language of design.

I think of myself as a collaborator, an educator, and a student, in equal measure. The majority of work I have produced over my career has been in collaboration with others. I have learned that design, in my practice, is in service of a greater goal: to communicate, to educate, to protect, or to repair. My years working in informal learning environments at the Brooklyn Children's Museum taught me that effective design requires understanding not just how people physically interact with a space, but how they process that experience cognitively and emotionally. That understanding has shaped everything I have brought into the classroom since.

Design education extends throughout a designer's career. Students must leave with the tools to pursue lifelong learning. Design is a social practice: collaboration and empathy are critical skills. And design is communication with intent, where every decision has a reason and a good designer can articulate why they made the choices they did.

Sustainability has been a central thread of my academic work since I began serving as Departmental Sustainability Coordinator in 2018. What began as a knowledge gap became a sustained research commitment: integrating circular design principles into both curriculum and creative practice.

In collaboration with Karol Murlak from the Industrial Design department, I co-developed and co-taught a cross-disciplinary course responding to the problem of single-use plastics from take-out food entering New York’s waterways. The course was sponsored by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. Student prototypes and interpretive content were exhibited in “The Future of Takeout” during Design Week in Times Square, receiving coverage including a mention in National Geographic.

I have explored biomaterials including mycelium and food waste as alternative packaging substrates, and authored an elective course introducing students to this emerging space. I have served as a coordinator for Pratt Earth Action Week across five semesters, organizing panels, workshops, and exhibitions on sustainability themes.

I also contributed design services to a multi-year NEH-funded research project led by faculty from Pratt’s Department of Math and Science: developing a Life Cycle Assessment Tool for cultural institutions, including website design, tool design, case study templates, and the beginnings of a travelling exhibition.

I have consistently developed new approaches to skills delivery and studio culture. I organized workshops with outside specialists covering product photography, 3D modeling, and 3D printing, and personally led hands-on sessions in vacuum forming, mold making, woodworking, metalwork, sewing, and model making for graduate students across multiple departments.

During the pandemic, I developed a library of video tutorials, allowing instructional content to reach students remotely and to persist beyond any single class session. This “flipped learning” approach, in which lecture and demonstration content is delivered as pre-packaged video, proved more effective than traditional lecture formats and has been integrated into Creative Coding, Structural Packaging, and Packaging Design courses on an ongoing basis.

I also led the evolution of midterm and end-of-term review structures for the MS program, introducing peer review components, clearer formats, and a more explicitly empathetic framework for critique. I actively solicited feedback from students and faculty to improve each iteration, treating the review itself as a designed educational experience.