zac's latest…

These days I lead product design at Brain Corp, running a team of designers working on autonomous mobile robots; machines that share aisles, hallways, and common spaces with people who never asked to be there. Most of my day goes into a single question: how does a stranger read an unfamiliar machine in a space they're only passing through? Do they notice it? Understand what it wants? Slow down, or route around it? My job is create that experience.

Running alongside that is my second life as an interactive and kinetic installation designer, building large-scale custom work for Burning Man, TEDx, galleries, music videos, and other music-centered events. The Jellyfish Forest first debuted at Burning Man in 2022 and hasn't stopped since: nine installations across four years, including Vancouver's Lumière Light Festival. It's survived playa dust storms, a full week of freezing rain, and an enormous number of strangers putting their hands on it.

Five years ago my partner and I started Big Wet, a music and arts festival, with forty people on a beach. The last one was four hundred people in a 40,000 sq ft venue: three stages, fifteen interactive installations, most of them designed and built by us. I handle creative direction, the physical builds, the site layout, the vendors, the permits, and all the parts nobody puts on a poster.

Before all this I was Tushy's first product development director. I started as the only technical product designer in a company of 7 and over 3.5 years built a full product team, led the design and development of 6 products to market, was named an inventor on two utility patents and one pending design patent, and had three products featured as the best toilet stool and bidet by The New York Times Wirecutter and CNN Underscored. I owned decisions from concept generation all the way through production validation overseas.

I thrive building in the innovation phase; envisioning the big picture, then getting dirty in the details. My experience also runs through medical device, recreational consumer product, military, and aerospace. I'm creating nonstop whether for fun or professionally, because I have an insatiable desire to understand the magic behind the mechanism. At the end of the day I like to build cool shit that connects with the human experience.