I design health and creative products people aren’t ashamed to live with.

The Problem

Stroke survivors need thousands of fine motor repetitions to rewire hand function, and most of that work happens at home, unsupervised. Home programs collapse there: the standard tools are beige clinical pegboards that read as homework about disability.

The real users are overwhelmed patients and stretched-thin caregivers. Existing products serve neither.

The Insight

Rehab tools don’t fail mechanically. They fail motivationally. Ikebana flower arranging already is graded fine motor therapy: reach, pinch, rotate, place, steady.

If every repetition produced something beautiful enough to keep, adherence would stop being the patient’s burden and become the product’s job.

Iteration

A clay and resin concept won a Special Prize at WIRED’s Creative Hack Awards. Successive prototype generations were shaped by occupational-therapist feedback, and the current design is re-engineered for manufacturability: rubber overmolding, injection-molded sliders, magnet and weighted-fabric assembly.

Design Decisions, and Why

The Problem

LGBTQ+ Americans report some of the highest rates of unmet healthcare need. We didn’t start with a product. We started with why.

The Research

Months of primary research through a trauma-informed lens: LGBTQ+ patients (emerging adults, 18–35), cardiologists, primary care physicians, and health-system leaders across Penn Medicine’s LGBTQ Health program, trans resource centers, and community organizations.

“I would do it for the sake of living, but I would not do it if I didn’t need it.”Patient, on preventative screening

“At home, numbers will almost always be more accurate.”Primary care physician

Iteration

We first iterated a full “healthcare at home” kit, a box system for routine self screening, then narrowed to the single highest-leverage touchpoint. One object done right beats a box of average ones.

The Insight Chain

• Fear of discrimination keeps people out of the clinic. Patients described downplaying symptoms and skipping anything that wasn’t urgent. “If I’m not dying, I’m fine.”
• Avoidance compounds hardest in cardiovascular health. Hypertension is the silent killer: it only surfaces through the routine measurement these patients avoid.
• Home should be the answer, but home monitoring fails in practice. Cuffs are fumbly one handed, anxiety inflates the first reading, devices vanish into drawers, logging lapses. Even physicians told us they don’t keep up with it.
• So the intervention point isn’t the clinic or an app. It’s the cuff itself.

Design Decisions, and Why

The Problem

In 2016 there was no established market where an artist could earn commissions and breathe. Representation ran through galleries, which took 50 to 70% of every sale and held the leverage that came with it.

The alternative, open marketplaces like Etsy, priced work like a craft fair, and being there could cost a serious artist their reputation.

The Insight

The gap was never price. It was power and positioning. Artists didn’t need a cheaper storefront; they needed a venue with gallery credibility and none of the gallery extraction.

Buyers wanted unique commissioned work and had no reliable way to find the right artist.

What I Carried Forward

Hermit was for artists, with artists: a platform built inside a community I belong to, made to bring power back to the creator.

Illness forced a pause, then a pivot. I take real pride in what we built, and I plan to return to it one day.

The discipline carried straight into Reblossom: curated trust, dignity for the end user, and power kept with the people the product serves.

Design Decisions, and Why

Not a class project. Five years leading a live product before the commission economy existed: hiring the team, setting direction, raising the capital to keep it alive.Building the company