Spotlight Archives - Interwoven

A Q&A with Visionary Entrepreneur Stephanie Benedetto

Spotlight articles shine a light on designers and design materials we admire. Our founder and principal designer Rebeccah Pailes-Friedman has met many wonderful designers as an educator and career designer, and in our Spotlight interviews we ask them about their work and their design journey. In this interview we spoke with Stephanie Benedetto, the attorney-turned-fintech entrepreneur and visionary founder of Queen of Raw, the company that created Materia MX, a groundbreaking excess inventory management software. Stephanie is on a mission to make fashion more sustainable by tackling one of the industry’s most persistent problems: waste. Her platform leverages blockchain technology to connect brands, retailers, and factories in a cloud-based marketplace where unused textiles, once destined for landfills, can be sold to new buyers. Her company has already saved over a billion gallons of water— enough to provide clean drinking water for 1.43 million people for three years—and has turned the concept of a circular economy into a profitable and scalable business model. Stephanie’s approach is not only about reducing environmental impact but also about transforming the industry’s supply and demand dynamics to benefit people, the planet, and profits. We asked her about how she was inspired to start the company, the challenges along the way, how the platform works, and how she measures impact.

Q: What was the turning point when you realized the extent of the waste in the fashion industry, and how did this inspire the creation of Queen of Raw?

A: Before Queen of Raw I was a Wall Street attorney, but I ended up specializing in fashion, technology and sustainability. And then the market crashed in 2008, and we were seeing the height of waste and greed and excess around the world. I took that as my opportunity to go out on my own. I always wanted to go build a business and change the world and I had a prior startup before Queen of Raw, which was called Paper No. 9. My co-founder and I had invented a new leather alternative and it was truly unlike any other leather alternative I had ever seen out in the market. As we were building that business, we would go to all these companies and brands and manufacturers around the world, and they would be buying this new innovative sustainable leather alternative from us. But we would go to the warehouses and see all this perfectly good stuff just sitting there, and we’d ask them, It’s great, you’re buying this from us, but what are you doing with all that stuff? And they said, Nothing, I’m going to landfill it, or burn it. That just seemed amazing. I was proud of what we were doing but we were still making something new. So that became this bigger problem that I really dove in early on and wanted to tackle head on: what could we do with all that perfectly good stuff?

When we started trying to solve it, the next step was trying to figure out how much stuff like that is out there. We did a survey. We sent it around to a couple thousand companies and manufacturers. It was a one question survey: How much do you have in excess inventory every year? And some numbers were lower, some numbers were higher, but the average was fifteen percent. Fifteen percent of every single step of every production run ended up as waste. It was crazy. Some were as high as thirty percent. Some claimed it to be as low as six to nine percent, but the clear average was fifteen percent. And at that point, when we started looking at those numbers, we knew this was a huge opportunity.

Stephanie Benedetto NASDAQ feature — *Photo courtesy of Stephanie Benedetto.*

Q: How did you know you had a great idea on your hands? At what point did you know that this business could be profitable?

A: When we were just starting to look at the market and validate the idea, it was 2013, 2014. There was a lot of amazing work happening with companies like Thread Up, Poshmark, Depop, and the RealReal. I loved what they were doing. It was the hottest market, and it’s still growing, but at the time they all were dealing in one unit at a time finished goods. Don’t get me wrong, every unit matters, and for finished goods that matters. But that led me to ask, What about all this other excess in inventory and supply chains? What about all the regular stuff; all the fabrics and trims and some finished goods, too, but the business to business stuff? And nobody seemed to be paying attention to that side.

The thesis was that if we could solve that up-the-chain waste for businesses, maybe that could help inform and support all the downstream supply chain waste. That’s when we started to see that this was a huge opportunity, and we started with the low hanging fruit. We had to test it, so we put up a marketplace. We barely even had a product to sell, but we had this point of view that a B2B resale marketplace for raw materials was a huge opportunity and we posted the site. The first few SKUs were actually our Paper No. 9 sustainable leather excess fabric. People started coming to the site like crazy, asking questions and looking for more. We saw the demand and we knew we had a real opportunity.

We want buyers and sellers who are participating in the circular economy and buying and selling with each other to recoup all the value with each other. Making money on materials is not our business model. We sell SAS software subscription fees to companies. They pay us annual membership fees to be a part of our platform and to use a whole suite of tools, and that’s it. All the reuse, resale, recycling, and donation happens on our platform. Everyone gets the best prices for participating in the network.

Q: You’ve been at the head of Queen of Raw for many years now. What challenges did you encounter along the way, especially early on?

A: We were early to the market for sure. We would go knock on doors in the fashion district, talking about this problem. And the world was not where it is today, we got plenty of doors slammed in our faces. But all it took was two. We had two early adopters: Marc Jacobson and Kering. They keyed in early on and believed in what we were doing and saw that there was an economic and an environmental opportunity here. All you need is one or two early adopters to really believe and then you can grow from there; get the case studies, get the learnings, and keep doing it. So, fortunately, some of those slammed doors have since turned into clients, but we had to find those early believers and keep pushing forward.

Q: How has your personal journey shaped your vision for Queen of Raw?

A: It’s why I do what I do. I had my first child right as I was starting to get the company out there, and the moment I had my eldest son, Jacob, right at that moment, I knew we were on to something. When your kid is born, it’s not about your life anymore. It’s about your children’s life and their children’s life and future generations. You want to do everything you can to ensure that that life is going to be a positive one. We had to build for this future. I want my kids to have clean water to drink, clothes that aren’t toxic to the earth, a planet to live on, and I think that’s what inspires me every single day. Early on as a working mom I was pushing the stroller in the New York City streets, and there was all this noise because it’s New York. I remember hearing something coming out of the stroller, he was four five at the time. I leaned into the stroller to hear what he was saying and I heard, Are you naked right now? You’re not. You’re using fabric. It’s everywhere, it’s polluting your water. I mean, he was literally doing my 60 second pitch! And on the one hand I’m thinking, I’ve been pushing this stroller and doing this damn pitch way too many times! But then I laughed and thought, You know what? If my five year old can get it, anyone can get it.

Stephanie Benedetto - Queen of Raw — *Photo courtesy of Stephanie Benedetto.*

Q: What’s the most surprising material or fabric you’ve seen saved from waste through Queen of Raw?

A: You’re not just getting a fabric when you deal with clothing and fabrics. There’s plastic and paper packaging around it, there are hang tags, there are labels, there is metal on the zippers, there are trims. There are all these other commodities and materials involved. So, although we got known for our work in textiles, we realized very quickly that our platform could also handle finished goods, trims, metals, packaging, and so on. We’ve grown in those verticals and categories into food and beverage and CPG [Consumer Packaged Goods] and other industries. Now in food and beverage we have hops and flavors from Anheuser-Busch and other things I never imagined when we started.

Working in fashion is amazing and it’s powerful. But I wondered what it would look like if companies could cross industries and leverage each other’s resources. Textiles are used in everything; car interiors, carpets. How do we get industries across industries to participate in these kinds of exchanges? That definitely got me excited, just to see what was possible. We’ve done some amazing work with Ralph Lauren, with Nike, with Cotopaxi, with Victoria’s Secret. These companies are participating and they’re selling, but they’re also buying and making incredible products while saving a lot of water, chemicals, carbon emissions, and waste while doing it.

Q: Can you discuss the role that technology and innovation play in making this all possible?

A: Our CTO always had this view of platforms and systems-baked thinking. We can create the coolest technology in the world, we can use machine learning and blockchain and all the buzzwords but it still needs to make sense. We use this cool technology to deliver a good business result. You need to have platforms to facilitate, to make it quick and easy to participate and to have a network and a community that trusts and is willing to participate while incentivizing everyone to act. That kind of point of view is embodied in the platform that we’ve created. Yes, it’s great technology. Yes, we want everyone to be able to participate in the circular economy while also making it fun to do so. At the end of the day, we just wanted to deliver a kickass result and save a lot of time, money, and resources for everyone.

Q: Could you walk us through how a typical transaction works on Queen of Raw?

A: Once we’ve done our work with the sellers and we have centralized in one place all the excess they have with clean images and clear product histories, and we know what is available to sell, then it’s about matching it to the greatest buyers in the world who want what this company has. As a buyer, when you log into our portal, it’s in the cloud. You don’t need to download anything. You don’t need to integrate. You login and, like any good software, you have your own private dashboard, which starts to learn based on your actions. What kind of volume are you looking for? What materials? Where are you in the world? The platform analyzes it and brings you the inventory that you want to see. And the beauty as a buyer is that this is not just a marketplace where you want to buy and click a button. You want to swatch something, you want to sample it, you want to produce it, you may want to reorder it. We manage that entire process but out of excess and deadstock. Our platform is a full suite of tools to help you do that.

Q: Can anyone shop your platform?

A: Yes, we have two versions. If you just want to see what we have and buy, we’ve got a freemium version for anyone to participate, especially at a smaller volume. If you do need the swatching, the sampling, all the data, all the procurement tools, we have kind of pay to play structure at different price points based on how big you are to be very fair and to cover our needs.

Q: What do you see influencing decisions about material selection? Are you seeing more of a shift toward the use of sustainable materials?

A: I use “circular economy” as opposed to “sustainability” because we talk about why we’re doing things for people and the planet, but it has to also be about the economy. If it does not make economic sense, why would a company adopt your solution? And we’ve said that since day one. The reason companies come to us is not just about sustainability. You get great stuff at a discount where you need it. The fact that it has a sustainable story to tell is a value add but that doesn’t have to be the only decision. That’s been what we spend a lot of time showing; the time, money, and resources saved by doing this will also doing good. And if you can say it’s a win-win, then how can they say no to that? Consumer demands and regulations are all supporting this move to sustainable materials and procurement, but they also need to deal with what’s there right now. Our hot and most searched fibers right now are cotton and polyester, but the fact that it’s dead stock means that you can cut down on your consumption of new polyester by using what’s already been made: deadstock polyester. So it’s a great way to fill out your portfolio sustainably while also saving money.

Q: How do you measure the water and environmental savings for businesses? Could you talk about why this focus is so important?

A: There are a lot of tools out there. I’m sure you’ve seen LCAs, Life Cycle Analyses, and other tools that say that they are measuring and reporting tools. What we found is that there was not a good methodology for excess and deadstock. It’s one thing if you’re making it from scratch and you can measure every step, but how do we think about excess and deadstock? We spent over two years with MIT, which is an investor in our company. MIT gave us a team of data scientists and we researched the hell out of this to come up with a methodology to measure the water, chemicals, the carbon emissions, and the waste that is avoided and offset by you rescuing this material instead of making new material. That’s what we’re measuring. So we can verify what the material is, what it’s made of, where it comes from, and who it ships to. And based on those touch points, we use our methodology and we measure and report. It’s been fully audited by Deloitte and other auditors so it is an accepted methodology, and we did it because we had to be specific.This is about excess inventory kept in circulation and what is avoided and offset by doing that.

We tied a lot to water because we felt like everybody talks about carbon emissions and waste, but in the volumes we’re dealing with—it’s trillions of dollars worth of waste and metric tonnage—people don’t understand those numbers. But everybody understood a clean glass of water to drink. So orienting it to water was relatable. By some accounts the textile industry is the number two polluter of clean water globally. Oil and agriculture are number one, which of course fashion contributes to it as well, but textile production at the current pace is number two. But we love seeing the flip side of that. The flip side is that fashion and textiles can solve the world’s water crisis if we rethink how we do things at scale. That’s why we’re here.

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A Q&A with Designer Artist Joshua Longo

Spotlight articles shine a light on designers and design materials we admire. Our founder and principal designer Rebeccah Pailes-Friedman has met many wonderful designers as an educator and career designer, and in our Spotlight interviews we ask them about their work and their design journey. In this interview we spoke with Joshua Longo, an artist and product designer who is currently the Creative Director of Hardgoods at Crate & Barrel. Joshua brings a designer’s strategic thinking as well an artist’s sensitivity to his remarkable work (we also love his Instagram). With a foundation in industrial design from Pratt Institute and a master’s in design research from Drexel University, he harnesses storytelling, innovation, research, and problem-solving to bring human-centered designs to life. His clients and collaborators include familiar names like Anthropologie, Free People, MIT School of Architecture, Adult Swim, and Ralph Lauren. We asked him about balancing art and design, how the two inform one another, how he approaches material selection, and more.

Designer Joshua Longo — *Photo courtesy of Joshua Longo.*

Q: Which came first, the artist, or the designer? Or perhaps it is more complicated than that?

A: This is a lesson in brevity, because I feel like we could spend a half an hour just on this question. I was interested in using my hands and making stuff for as long as I can remember. I knew I wanted to go to art school. I didn’t know about industrial design then, I went for computer graphics. I wanted to be a part of the movie industry and do special effects. I started making with my hands and then drawing.

I wasn’t a star artist. I wasn’t everyone’s most-likely-to-be-Van Gogh. That wasn’t me until I got to college and Foundation kicked my ass at Pratt. After the first semester I switched out of computer graphics because I didn’t want to spend all of my time in front of the computer. I realized that I liked to work with my hands. I stuck with my very difficult drawing teacher, who had a 50% fail rate, and drawing became a passion. To this day I draw every day, all the time. I realized that I want to make stuff and industrial design seemed to be a practical place where I could get a job but also just get an education in making things.

In my junior year I was up for an internship at General Motors. I was in Martin Skalski’s Transportation Design studio. He had a relationship with General Motors, and there were students he preselected beforehand, letting them know, Look out for Josh. Look out for these two other guys. These are the people I recommend for the internship. I didn’t wind up getting the internship. Instead, I spent the summer making stuff. I went home and it was the first summer I didn’t have a job. I started sewing sophomore year, so I had a sewing machine and—if you’ve been through some sort of design curriculum, you understand the rigor of it—you don’t just come off of junior year or Martin Scalski’s class just doing nothing, your brain is going 500 miles an hour. So I wound up working on design and art as if I was still in my regular school practice. I started making sculptures that summer. That’s when sculpture started. It was very rudimentary but that was the beginning of me realizing my own voice through a material process, which could be either design or art. Up until then it was all student projects. That was the beginning.

sculpture by artist designer Josh Longo — Sculpture. *Photo courtesy of Joshua Longo.*

Q: Some of your sculptures turned into animations and design work for clients. How does your art inform your design and vice versa?

A: It’s something that happened organically at first but then I started applying it as I got older and wiser. This is layered. I always needed a job, because I think it’s important to share for other people who come from blue collar or lower income families that I came from a blue collar family. We didn’t have a lot of money so I always needed a job. I always had to make sure I was paying the rent, no one was going to take care of it for me. So I always had a foot in the industry; whether it was freelance or full-time, I was always working in industrial design or product design.

My first job was at Macy’s, and while I was doing that I was making all this soft stuff because I just felt compelled. I had to do it. There was no not doing it. I had to do it and I did it at night. During the day I would work at my job and then at night and on the weekends, I would spend time making art. Around 2006, people started to take notice. That was also the beginning of social media. I started putting my work out there. I was putting it out on MySpace, Friendster, and then eventually Facebook and Instagram. Once you get one thing, you get some momentum and it snowballs. Then what happened was 10 years of making stuff, promoting myself, small gallery shows, coffee shops, really small. Nothing crazy.

Mask by Josh Longo — Mask. *Photo courtesy of Joshua Longo.*

The Creative Director for a company in Germany bought one of my sculptures, and then, five years later, he started a company and he wanted to work with me. Next, I’m doing puppets for a German commercial, getting paid handsomely for maybe a month of work. In actuality it was 10 years of not really making money from the soft sculptures that led to this gig. Since then I have confidence that if I spend a few years on an idea, a family, a style—creating a cohesive visual language—something will happen. I pivoted into illustration later on, I did a bunch of illustration, promoted it, and after a few years Adult Swim contacted me and asked if I could do some animation for them.

There is definitely a time period where you do a bunch of stuff, you make it good enough and, if you promote it, it leads to commercial work. I don’t get as much of that recently because my job is so time-consuming but you just make stuff that you love and eventually get paid for it. Somehow.

Q: Do you ever have nightmares about your creatures?

A: I used to, before I went to therapy regularly. I don’t have go anymore but there was a period in my 30s where I went very regularly. Extreme anxiety and just not dealing with things led to night terrors and waking dreams, walking around. I haven’t in a long time because therapy works.

I’ve been working on these current sculptures for about a year because I’ve moved, done renovations, all that stuff, but the scale is manageable because I can take it with me. So I’ve been working on smaller things that I can work on on the couch if I have an hour. They’re really hand intensive; everything’s hand sewn or handmade and combination materials. My current job-life situation allows for either drawing or small scale sculpture but I would like to get to larger things again.

Q: Could you tell us about your drawing materials and how you select materials for sculpture? Do you have an approach to how you select or work with materials?

A: My drawing is mostly black and white. I do some color drawing here and there but not as often. It’s mostly black and white in sketchbooks. I fill sketchbooks pretty regularly, once a month I’ll fill one, but I have three going at any given time. When it comes to design, it’s usually more structured in that I have to do a collection. We’re trying to hit a certain amount of price points. Wood, metal, etc. I think I have enough manufacturing knowledge in me that, when I start sketching, I’m keeping all of those things in mind as I’m sketching: manufacturing capability, what’s actually possible, gravity, cost.

I’m a figurative sculptor in that I’m making figures. Generally the outcome is going to be a figure of some sort, whether it’s an animal, or a person, or some sort of imagined form of that. I start either with material or with a gesture. It’s one or the other. For example, say I want to play with leather. I wonder, What does that do? So I start boiling leather, I start shaping it, I start backing it, forming it, and then seeing what happens; letting the material dictate the outcome instead of trying to dictate the outcome before I start. For me, it’s the discovery through the play of the material that’s fun. I ask, What can the material do? What expression can it generate? Then I can then play. So the material tells me where to go.

Monster Skin Rug by Joshua Longo — Monster Skin Rug. *Photo courtesy of Joshua Longo.*

When I was teaching at Drexel, where I got my master’s degree, I spent my time just exploring that, how it can inform a design process given the time and how you don’t always have to start off with the end result. First I let the materials dictate and then I just play. With leather, linen, wood, ceramic…Oftentimes I make pieces and they’ll sit around for years—there are these ceramic heads that I made 10 years ago—and then they finally find a home as I start making other things because I have all these pieces.

I visited Jim Henson on Long Island and it was so amazing to see the Sesame Street studios. There were drawers of eyes, drawers of noses, drawers of hands, drawers of just ties. That was a huge inspiration. I realized, I could do this for my own practice. I don’t have to start and finish. I can just make pieces. Then, as I’m making stuff, I have an alphabet of pieces that lend themselves to my projects.

Q: How do you balance the spontaneity of your creative process with the more structured aspects of industrial design?

A: If I had the luxury of time, I would spend more time designing in the same way I make art. When I make art I create boundaries but I allow myself freedom within those boundaries, whether it’s a medium or even time, it’s allowing yourself x amount of time to play to arrive at a certain conclusion, whether it be a show or commercial product. Especially as I get older, time is the most precious thing. That’s all I want. I just want enough time to get into a flow state and to create without worrying about what the end result will be. That’s wonderful.

The commercial pressure of design, especially as I’ve been doing it a little over 20 years now, the amount of time you get from concept to deliverable has decreased by… I’m going to say 50%. I don’t have an exact number but in my world, it’s insane. It’s super compressed. I manage something like several hundred products a season [at Crate & Barrel] and we do four seasons a year, and there’s just no way to explore an idea that intensely.

kitchenbycrate gadgets by Joshua Longo — KitchenbyCrate Gadgets. *Photo courtesy of Joshua Longo.*

That said, sometimes you do get to do design and you get to play and you carve out a certain amount of time for process. I helped integrate AI processes into our current product design, and I carved time out of my schedule to figure that out. That was fun and that it allowed me to play, and then I was supported. Once my bosses and leaders saw what was happening, they allowed me more time and they put their thumb of approval on it, and that allowed me to play more. So, it’s a juggling act.

Q: I’m sure you see students who are struggling to balance their inner artist with their inner designer. As a professor, what advice do you offer students trying to find their voice in the creative industry?

A: This is the question I get asked most by students because whenever I present, I present all sides of my life, personal and commercial work. They ask, How do you do that? Well, I didn’t sleep in my 20s, I have a lot of energy, and I’m naturally obsessive. That’s something I can’t train or encourage, that’s something that’s innate for me. But creating a practice and discipline is something I got from school.

I am someone who gets highly distracted easily and often, and the more structure I have in my day, the better off I am. The minute I go off my own calendar, it’s not good for me. So for me, it’s about simple things that I can control. I keep on a very structured schedule. I brush my teeth. I eat the same thing every day. I am close to one of those people that would wear the same thing every day. There are certain things that I keep highly structured and then, where most people might sit and watch TV, I’ll sit and draw and watch TV. So I do relax. It’s just that I’m usually multitasking. Because let’s say I have a thousand ideas, which is not underselling it. I know, I’m only going to get to 1% of them out, and I can’t stop thinking about them until I put them in the real world. There’s a cycle that happens in my head where if I don’t get an idea out, it will keep on coming up and remind me, Hey, Josh! I love it. It’s also exhausting but if I didn’t do it, I feel like I’d be missing out. We only have one life to live. I’m thinking of Jeff Goldblum quoting George Bernard Shaw and I can’t recall the quote but the essence is that you only have one life to live, why not burn the candle at both ends?

Q: What’s next for Longoland? Can we expect to see your work expand into new mediums or spaces?

A: That’s a great question, and it’s just the question I’m asking myself. I’ve been drawing on cardboard and that’s been fun. The drawings are super simple cartoons.

illustration by josh longo — *Photo courtesy of Joshua Longo.*

I’ve been doing Crate & Barrel for five years and I feel like I’ve accomplished what I wanted to accomplish. I’m still excited. I still want to do more. But I’ve accomplished what I set out to accomplish commercially with the brand. Before I started, I had a show at a church. I rented out of church for an evening and had 21 kinetic sculptures that created sound, and a team of 11 or 12 people to help me activate the sculptures. But what I didn’t tell you is that we emptied the church completely and took out all the furniture. So it’s an empty church in Philadelphia, we put 21 sculptures inside, and then we essentially played the church like a giant instrument. Then a month later, I got a job offer from Crate & Barrel, and I was designing pots and pans. So, my artistic practice was heading towards a performative, all encompassing space; creating the entirety of the environment through object-person relationships. I would love to get back to that but I think it would require me to get into a different job setting. It’s not something I can do on the couch.

I believe that making art or design, or whatever you want to commit to truly for yourself, is one of the most enriching and rewarding experiences that a person can have. If you can get past hating what you make. There are a lot of people that can’t get past that, they can’t enjoy the process regardless of the outcome. I’m not working towards a gallery show. I’m not working for acclaim anymore, because I’ve achieved some success. And trust me, it’s nice and I’ll keep on taking it, but it’s not the ultimate goal. Now I want to get to the space where I get to play, and play with stuff with other people.

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A Q&A with Furniture Designer Bruce Hannah, Part II

A Q&A with Iconic Furniture Designer Bruce Hannah, Part II

Bruce Hannah is a renowned American industrial designer celebrated for his innovative and practical approach to design. A graduate of Pratt Institute in 1963, Hannah’s career blossomed through his collaboration with Andrew Morrison, resulting in groundbreaking furniture designs for Knoll International in the 1970s. Establishing his own design office in 1976, Hannah continued to create award-winning products, including the acclaimed Hannah Desk System, recognized as a “Design of the Decade” by the Industrial Designers Society of America in 1990. He joined the Pratt faculty in 1993 and has received numerous accolades for his teaching and thought leadership. Hannah’s influential work includes co-curating the “Unlimited By Design” exhibition and authoring notable books on design, underscoring his profound impact on the field. In Part II, we spoke to him about activities that influence his creative process, the project he’s most proud of, and the key lessons designs students need to know today.

Portrait of Industrial Designer Bruce Hannah — *Photo courtesy of Bruce Hannah.*

Q: What hobbies or activities do you enjoy outside of design that influence your creative process?

A: I like to cut the lawn. I’m not strong enough to do that anymore but I found a lovely guy to do it and that’s fine. I like doing work. I like physical work. And fishing. I love fishing! My grandfather taught me how to fish, and my father used to take me fishing. Fishing has always fascinated me. I taught a class called Fishing for Ideas. I took students fishing! That started because I realized that, in this one class, almost no one had had that experience. So I took them fishing. We would go at the end of February, and we would go fishing for trout in the snow. Now if you can get more poetic than that as an experience, I’m not sure. Then of course you leave and you go to Denny’s and have lunch. You have this insanity of being totally immersed in something, because we were fishing fly rods. None of them knew how to fish with fly rods and I found this wonderful man, Mark Melanowski, who was a retired fireman who knew more about theology and bugs than most scientists. He was wonderful. I would bring a bunch of my fly rods, he would bring his, and they would all go fly fishing. Fly fishing is all about understanding what the fish are eating. Just putting a worm on there? No. What you’re doing is studying hatches of insects. As the hatch progresses the insects change. They may all start out black, little black gnats, but the next week they’re black gnats with little white wings, and the next week is black gnats with little white wings and a red tail. It’s nuts, but the fish know. If you’re in the third week and you throw them a black fly, they’re like, Yeah, we saw that one. We already saw that movie. Show us a new movie. So there’s this wonderful thing about designing fishing equipment where you have two customers, which is very unusual. You have to sell the fisherman, and then you have to sell the fish.

My biggest thing I like to do is wander around. Andy and I learned how to do that. It’s something that people don’t do well. People like to know where they’re going. They like getting on the plane to Las Vegas and getting off, and knowing exactly what they’re doing when they get to Las Vegas. There are very few people that you can wander around with and bump into things, and Andy was one of those people. We spent an inordinate amount of time wandering around New York City doing nothing.

The other part of our philosophy was: Try to do nothing. Which is hard. I would teach my students that. They were confused, Do nothing? That’s the opposite of what we’ve paying money to do here. I said, Doing nothing is the most successful thing you can do, because that’s when something will happen in your brain that you don’t expect. If you lead a very regimented life and know where you’re going all the time, you’re not going to see anything new. You’re not going to be startled. So one of the things I try to do is wander around, which is fun. My wife and I have done that. We’ll be on a super train in Italy and get off at a random stop. We have no idea where we are. Find a hotel. We are more like that as human beings. We are explorers. It’s hard to explore now because they’ve got all the signs up already. Oh, we’re at Exit 4.

Q: Could you tell us about a project or piece you are especially proud of and why?

A: Unlimited by Design an exhibit that My wife and I did at the Cooper Hewitt National design Museum. about accessibility for everyone. That was a long time in the making. It started out because I met this guy George Covington. He is a blind photographer. Let that sink it a little bit. George takes pictures to see. He was born legally blind in the early 40s, so he’s my age. His mom said no, he’s going to regular school. He ended up going to college to study journalism, and got a law degree. He ended up working at the National Park Service. He was in charge of accessibility there, making sure that things were accessible, which at the time they were not. George, with these black cowboy boots and white cane, banged on doors in the Senate and the House Representatives to get the American Disabilities Act through. George and I had this wonderful, funny relationship. We wrote a book together called Access by Design which was about making everything accessible for everyone all the time. And then we put on a conference in 1992 called Access to Daily Living, the first international conference on accessibility. All of this is tied into trying to figure out how to make the world accessible to everyone.

We worked with Diane Pilgrim to create the exhibit, who had MS and was in a wheelchair, and was the director of design at the Cooper Hewitt. There were lots of great products in the exhibit, and it was fully accessible. There was an accessible playground in the museum, which the lawyers went crazy over. Everyone wanted to play on that playground. We tried to redefine design, for all. I’m very proud of that. I wish I had paid more attention and gotten a book made of it. I think that would have been important. As we seem to do with everything that is good in the world, we take two steps forward and I think we’re going into the one step back phase at this point. Although I’m constantly surprised at how much more accessible New York City is today than it was 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.

Q: You are also a design educator. What key lessons do you think design students should keep in mind right now?

A: They have never changed. What’s important now is the same sh*t that was important to the Egyptians. I’m involved with City Tech, which is the City University of New York’s design and architecture thing. It’s in Brooklyn. I got roped into it by a student of mine, Jenny, who said last August, Bruce, would you mind teaching an introductory class to industrial design students? So I went in. These are New York City kids, working and going to school. It’s in the mechanical engineering department. After three weeks I fell in love with them because I commuted to Pratt from Staten Island two hours each way for four years. That was not unusual. And these kids do it and they work. Half of them come late to class because they got out of work late or the trains broke or whatever, right? And then the guy that hired me, Andy Zang, said, We’ve been working on this new curriculum. Would you be interested? So we’re developing a four-year industrial design program. We’ve written 20 or so class outlines and syllabuses. It’s very different from when Kowstellow invented design education. There are so many people in charge of so many things. It’s frightening.

So the list is exactly the same. What should you teach kids? The first thing you would teach any college student is to trust themselves. It has nothing to do with skills. It has nothing to do with anything else. If they can’t trust their own intuition, we’re in deep number two. Learn how to sketch. I don’t care what you sketch with. I do not have this. I do not think that there’s a specific tool or specific paper that will make your idea better. Use an old newspaper and an old pencil that you found on the floor. As long as you can sketch out the idea so that somebody else can understand it, it’s pretty good. Same with 3D. Figure out how to teach them how to make stuff three-dimensionally. As we have little money at City Tech, I based my whole class on eight and a half by eleven sheets of paper and anything we could do with it. You can buy a ream of paper, which is 250 sheets of paper, for six dollars and it’s the cheapest material you can buy. And if you limit them to it, you cannot lose. You eliminate the glue. So we make a lot of stuff out of eight and a half by eleven sheets of paper. It’s cheap and it’s disposable. The first exercise I give them is to design a paper airplane. Everybody can do it. The cool thing is: then you ask them to write down the steps. And they go, I can’t do that. I say, You have to write the steps down. And they realize that their brain will explode into a purple cloud, because you have to learn to do that from somebody else. This is my introduction: You will learn how to make 3D things by making 3D things. There’s no manual for this. The act of doing is another thing that you have to instill in students.

So now they’re drawing things, sketching things, and they’re making things. The other thing is that they have to figure out how to tell you what they’ve just done. That’s the other thing that’s important. We have a lot of people that have good ideas, but they’re terrified of telling anybody, for some reason. Psychologists can go into that for the next thousand years. You need to make them stand up in front of the class and tell you how they made their airplane.

Those are the four essential skills. Everything else, computers, whatever, we’ve all had to learn different things. I had to learn how to draw on mylar, with ink. Insane. You think computers are hard? Try not to smudge that drawing. It’s all hard. All of those skill things are hard, but design is really about communicating your ideas. Get them out of your head, put them on a piece of paper, and have the courage to stand up in front of a bunch of people and say, Well this is what I think. What do you think?

The other thing is you have to teach them how to pick up their heart and put it back in their body. Essential lesson! Of course 3D modeling is important, but you can’t 3D model your heart that’s laying on the table, that has just been smashed. You have to figure out how to put your heart back in your body and go, Okay. I’ll do this again tomorrow.

The hardest thing to learn is to not give a sh*t what anybody else thinks. That’s the hardest. Most people can’t do that. Paul McCartney doesn’t give a sh*t what you think about his songs, which is why he wrote 695 of them. He just keeps doing it. Eventually, you’re going to like one of them, or you’re not, and he doesn’t care. Most people who are successful really don’t give a sh*t what you think about them. They just do it, and they’re all freaks. Normal people love freaks. I tell my students about this. I say, Okay, now you’ve presented it and you’re heard whatever I said, and you have to not give a sh*t about what I said. You have to absorb it. You have to kind of go, maybe that’s right. Maybe they’re correct about how I’m thinking about this. Maybe I should try to do it this way. But you really can’t care. The best designers that I know really don’t care.

The essential lesson is: trust yourself and your intuition, because you’re probably right. That doesn’t make everybody else wrong, they could all be right, too. But you have to have that feeling. Another important thing is to learn how to listen to people. That’s part of the presentation thing, to begin to learn how to listen to people. Many people lie every day. People get up, and they lie about four times before they even brush their teeth. To the person they’re laying next to, whoever. We don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. 90% of the time, that’s why we lie. People don’t know what they need. Did anyone know they needed an iPhone that would replace 50 products or more? It’s some enormous number of products that we don’t need anymore. Did anybody know they needed it? No, of course not. But there was this crazy person, Steve Jobs, who kept saying, That’s too hard. He had this vision of a thing that you could carry around in your pocket. Now everybody in the world has one, it has changed the world.

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Be sure to check out Part I of this interview!

A Q&A with Iconic Furniture Designer Bruce Hannah, Part I

A Q&A with Furniture Designer Bruce Hannah, Part I

Bruce Hannah is a renowned American industrial designer celebrated for his innovative and practical approach to design. A graduate of Pratt Institute in 1963, Hannah’s career blossomed through his collaboration with Andrew Morrison, resulting in groundbreaking furniture designs for Knoll International in the 1970s. Establishing his own design office in 1976, Hannah continued to create award-winning products, including the acclaimed Hannah Desk System, recognized as a “Design of the Decade” by the Industrial Designers Society of America in 1990. He joined the Pratt faculty in 1993 and has received numerous accolades for his teaching and thought leadership. Hannah’s influential work includes co-curating the “Unlimited By Design” exhibition and authoring notable books on design, underscoring his profound impact on the field. In Part I, we spoke to him about who has influenced him, his design philosophy, and how he feels about Knoll reissuing the iconic 1974 Office Chair he designed with Andrew Morrison.

Q: Can you share some of your early influences and mentors who shaped your approach to design?

A: I’d never have gone to Pratt if I hadn’t had Miss Egan as a Spanish teacher. She also taught art, but I took Spanish with her for two years. When I went to school you had to have two years of a language but you could take three. She was also my advisor. I went to her and I said, Miss Egan, what should I be doing as a junior? And she said, Please don’t take Spanish again.

So I took art with her, and I had fun doing it of course, and I came around to art. I applied to one school because she said, You should go to Pratt. I didn’t even know what Pratt was, by the way, and I was lucky enough to get in.

There are many other people who influenced me. At Pratt: Rowena Reed Kostellow and Alexander [Kostellow]. I’m responsible for creating books about both of them. Gail, my first wife, wrote the book about Rowena. That book is based on a slideshow that she and I worked on in 1980…I want to say 1988. Tucker Viemeister and I just did a book of the collected writings of Alexander Kostellow, which is 176 pages of stuff, which is pretty interesting. I’d been wanting to do that for years. I’d never gotten around to it and then Tucker said, Why don’t we do it? We self-published it on Blurb but people aren’t very interested in it. They should be interested in it because he says wonderful things. And he’s considered one of the fathers—if not the father—of industrial design education in this country.

He was asked one time, What about the Bauhaus? He said that it was a very interesting education but that it wasn’t for us. We needed to develop our own approach. One of the successes of his industrial design departments is that he was very interested in getting people jobs, as I have been as a design teacher.

There is a long list of people that I owe. Fred Ratti, who gave me my first job as a salesman. It wasn’t my first job ever, that was as a designer at S.S. White dental manufacturing on Staten Island, which was the big factory in the town I lived in, in Prince Bay. We lived by the 7:30 whistle or the 4:30 whistle. I grew up in one of those towns where everybody worked for S.S. White. When I graduated from college, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I went there and I talked my way into a job, and Fred Ratti was a supplier from Engineered Plastic Product. He made custom plastic product parts for a product I worked on there. When I came back from the Army he said, Do you want to come work with me? I was making pretty good money by that time, being a designer, and I said, What can you pay me? He said, $100 a week. I said, I started three years ago at $100 a week. I’m making considerably more than that. And he said, That’s all I can afford. I said, I’ll take the job.

He was an enormous influence in terms of allowing me to stumble around with clients I didn’t realize were very important. Bell Labs was one of them at the time. This was the 1960s. Bell Labs invented the way we lived today. It wasn’t Mark Zuckerberg.

I figured out that I was a designer because I was calling on design firms. They were handing me drawings to take back to the shop and figure out how to make, and I was figuring out how to make them. After a couple years I realized, Hey, I actually know how to design stuff. Those were wonderful designers—I’m not calling them out—but I was taking their drawings and making them workable.

Q: How would you describe your design philosophy, and how has it evolved over the years?

A: My design philosophy really started to form when I stumbled on Andy Morrison and Steve [Gianakos] on Staten Island. We had worked together at Pratt. Andy went off to Montreal to work on the 1967 World’s Fair and I was working, running around New York City and New Jersey, figuring out how to make stuff. I quit that job and I left, happily. But I said, I have to try to do this design thing. And I didn’t really want to work for anyone. I had worked for two people who were wonderful employers, but they didn’t really make me want to live my life. So I designed this fiberglass chair, and I found out there was a plastic place on Staten Island called Aegis Plastic. They still exist, by the way. It was in a basement room full of furniture. There isn’t enough gold leaf in the world to cover all the stuff in this basement. It was Roma Furniture. I walked in and I thought, Oh my God, I know these forms. Andy and Steve were there, and that’s how I rekindled that friendship with Andy and Steve.

Andy said to me, You want to design a chair for Knoll? I said, Sure. The philosophy was: design a chair for Knoll and retire. That was it. Along the way we discovered all these other things that we thought were important. The first product we did together for Knoll was the suspension seating. It’s a sofa system, and the major structural element of it is a sailboat mast. We decided that we could make a very light piece of furniture with two aluminum castings and a couple of structures made out of the sailboat mast. We figured out how to make a sofa that could hold a thousand pounds but weighed 88 pounds. We also had this theory that everything costs a dollar a pound or it costs two dollars a pound an hour, or whatever – everything costs some denominator. So the less of it you could use, the better off everybody was. If you use less material, then you transport less material, dig up less material. And if you make it recyclable, you’ve stopped that habit of making something and throwing it away.

Part of that thinking was formed by a guy named Witold Rybczynski, who still teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and has written a bunch of books. He had a laboratory at McGill. And Andy knew him, and he would come occasionally to hang out in our studio. He’d designed a little house made out of all kinds of recycled things with this 1966 tertiary water. So you have black water, gray water, white water, or clear water. You have solar panels. The house is made out of recycled sulfur. There are mountains of sulfur in the world that no one knows what to do with. We started to be influenced by these people we had no business actually hanging out with because they were much smarter than we were. Witold wrote a wonderful book that I still to this day recommend called Home. It’s about this new thing that human beings want which is called Comfort. A new idea actually, most people in the world are not comfortable yet, but, most Americans and most Europeans and lots of Asians… their lives are comfortable. Lots of Africans are comfortable. So that idea started to figure into it. Our neighbor was Walter De Maria, who was on the second floor of our building at 27 Howard Street. Walter did The Lightning Field and The Broken Kilometer. He filled a gallery in Stuttgart full of dirt. One of the first conceptual artists. Very interesting. So he was hanging around. I mean, nobody was doing anything. We were doing stuff but no one was getting on planes and going anywhere. We were in what would eventually become SoHo. We were playing stickball in the middle of West Broadway.

There were all these influences that led us to start thinking about the refinement of an idea in poetic ways. Walter’s work was very much influenced by that. So Andy and I were thinking not only about using less material, but also how we would go about doing it. The philosophy became very much like poetic writing. Poetry is about essence and trying to be clear about what you’re saying while saying something in a grand way. We started to think of all the things we were designing as poems.

So we didn’t use staples because I don’t know how you control staples. Staples are sort of like a lot of people putting a lot of dots at the end of something. You’re not quite sure how many you should have or where they go, and there’s no way to control it. We started to eliminate things from our vocabulary of design, and that led us to thinking about how few parts It would take to do something.

We’d ask, If it takes four parts, can you do it with three? If you can do it with three, can you do it with two? If you can do it with two, can you do it with one? If you do with one, do you really need it? We would say these things to each other. Andy and I worked together for 10 years, night and day, 365 days a year. It was basically a marriage. The sad thing is that he died just months before Knoll announced that they were going to reintroduce the chair. The whole thing has been very emotional in that way.

Bruce Hannah with 1974 Knoll Office Chairs — *Photo courtesy of Bruce Hannah.*

Q: Yes, the Office Chair you designed for Knoll with Andrew Morrison in 1974 is being reissued. How do you feel about this iconic design coming back to life? What do you think keeps the design timeless?

A: Emotional, fantastic, unexpected, delighted, excited. The thing was, Andy and I really wanted to design an antique. We thought if you designed an antique, or something that would become an antique, people loved it. Or they liked it a lot. Think of Michael Thonet’s chairs, they’re going on 200 years old as a design, these wooden chairs, because he figured out how to bend wood so it didn’t crack. And then once he did it, he kept doing it. That’s what you do: you beat the idea to death. You just keep banging on it. The Thonet side chair, due to genius or serendipity, comes along just as cafe society is exploding. We needed those chairs. People were going to sit around outside and drink coffee or tea and read the newspaper. They were wealthy, and that hadn’t happened before, not at this scale. So you had a lot of people walking around Vienna saying, We’re going to go listen to music in the afternoon. We need little chairs. We would look at these objects and try to figure out, What is that about?

I think timelessness comes back to Essence. There’s something essential about it. There’s essence in the form, and I think that’s different from ‘essential’. We really thought about it. We tried to make an office chair with the least number of parts. There were some givens. You had four or five casters, and you had a tilt mechanism, and a lift mechanism. But what else do you need? You need a base and a frame of some kind. So the thought was, Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue…pillows.

We said, Okay, so we’ll go with the pillow. When we made that first frame, we just bolted the pillows on because we didn’t have a better way to do it, we hadn’t thought it through yet. At first we thought we could figure out how to make seat cushions and back cushions that just popped into place. We struggled with that and finally we just bolted them on. Going back to the poetry of it, the tilt mechanism we were using at the time was called the Helms mechanism. It was a mechanism that Knoll had designed for all of its chairs. They said, You have to use this. We said, Okay. The way you adjusted the tilt was with a little Allen wrench. So I said, Why don’t we connect the cushions with the Allen wrench that already exists? Then you’ll get the chair and you have one tool to adjust it, disassemble it, and assemble it. That always interested us also, How few things can you put something together with?

Every designer that we talked to said, Hide the bolts. But one of the other philosophies that came from that chair was, Let’s just make it obvious. Let’s just use them as an element. So they became an element.

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Stay tuned for Part II of this interview!

A Q&A with Biomechanical Engineer Karl Zelik

Spotlight articles shine a light on designers we admire. Our founder and principal designer Rebeccah Pailes-Friedman has met many wonderful industry experts as an educator and career designer, and in our Spotlight interviews we ask them about their work and their journey. In this interview we spoke with biomechanical engineer and Vanderbilt University professor Karl Zelik.

In addition to being a professor, Karl is the co-founder and co-director of the Center for Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology at Vanderbilt, a research center dedicated to improving health, mobility and independence for those with physical disabilities and to enhancing human performance and well-being through advances in movement science and assistive technology. He is also the co-founder and chief scientist of the exosuit company HeroWear. He’s on the board of a nonprofit called the American Bionics Project, which aims to accelerate the development and adoption of revolutionary technologies for people with lower limb disabilities, and he does biomechanics and assistive technology consulting in industry. In short, he knows what he’s talking about. We met Karl while working with HeroWear on the first Apex exosuit, and we’ve followed his work and his social media with interest ever since. His ability to translate technical information for stakeholders of all stripes makes him an ideal person to talk to about engineering. We asked him about what drew him to the biomechanics and mobility space, how he integrates comfort into his projects, and what he sees in the future of assistive technology.

biomechanical engineer Karl Zelik — *Photo courtesy of Karl Zelik.*

Q: You are one of the principal investigators at Vanderbilt’s Center for Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology, we are honored to have worked with you on a few projects. For those who might not be familiar, could you explain what biomechanical engineering is?

A: The field of biomechanics really just means that we’re applying the laws of physics to biological systems like animals or humans. We use biomechanics to understand human movement and to understand nature. We also use it to design better tools, better equipment, and to pretty much design everything in our environment to work better with the human body: to keep us healthy, to help improve our performance, to help improve our well-being and the things that we can do in society. Biomechanics has a hand in almost everything you interact with, from the shoes you wear to the seats that you sit on to pretty much every tool and toy that you encounter in your daily life.

Q: How did you get into this field, and how did health and mobility become your area of specialization? What is your origin story?

A: I am the second oldest of four boys in my family. I was very into sports when I was young. I was also incredibly reckless with my body. As a kid, I got a lot of broken bones. I got a lot of stitches, mostly doing stupid things. I was always testing the limits of the human body, of my own body. I was fortunate in college to discover biomechanical engineering, which was a much safer way to test the limits of the human body. I got really interested—I’d say hooked—on researching and developing assistive technologies. Those are technologies that could help keep us safe, that could help protect or repair broken bodies and keep us physically active and doing the things that we love. So I’ve been hooked on this field of exoskeletons and prosthetics for nearly 2 decades.

Q: Could you share an example of an impactful innovation that your lab has generated?

A: I’ve been doing research and development in the field of biomechanics and assistive technologies for the last 17 years. We’ve worked on everything from prosthetic limbs to exoskeletons to wearable sensor technologies.

To date, the most impactful innovation has been the work we’ve done around back exosuits. These were initially developed and researched and validated at our lab at Vanderbilt University, where we also developed a lot of the underlying patent innovations. We then spun off a private company called HeroWear, which manufactures and sells these exosuits. You all [at Interwoven] have been an integral part of that process.

Our mission is to help save the backs of hard-working men and women in all sorts of physical industries like logistics, manufacturing, military, and many others. Our current exosuit, the HeroWear Apex 2, is now used by thousands of workers around the globe. It’s essentially a three pound suit that takes 50 to more than 100 pounds of strain off the back of a worker every time they bend to lift. It’s having a big impact in terms of reducing the strain people feel on their body, reducing the wear and tear, and helping people be able to do their jobs without sacrificing their bodies or sacrificing their long-term health. It’s helping people to go home at the end of the day and have more energy and do the things that they enjoy, it’s helping reduce injuries in the workplace, and it’s helping workers stay healthy and productive. That is something that’s been really rewarding to see, and Interwoven has played a critical role in helping take the fundamental science that we developed at Vanderbilt and translate that into a product that can work in the real world; that can scale across different industries and different organizations.

Karl Zelik wearing the HeroWear Apex 2 Exosuit. *Photo courtesy of Karl Zelik.* *Photo by Beth Harris.*

Q: What impact do you see assistive technology having on the future of healthcare?

A: Assistive technology has a long history of impact within the healthcare space, from prosthetic limbs to braces to wheelchairs and in many other assistive devices and tools. It feels like we are entering a new era. The next generation of healthcare assistive technology is on the horizon. Robotic exoskeletons for people who are paralyzed just received Medicare reimbursement codes this year, 10 years after they received FDA approval. This was a massive milestone that just happened earlier this year, a watershed moment for the assistive technology field in healthcare. I think this is an example of the type of next generation technologies that are on the horizon.

There’s a ton of excitement right now about new assistive technologies, to help—first and foremost—patients, but also to help the clinicians and the caregivers. The truth is that there’s also a lot of hype right now, and there’s a ton of work ahead. I’m optimistic about the long term impact of these emerging technologies and the impact that they’re going to have on people’s lives, particularly for folks who are dealing with disabilities or diseases or injuries.

Q: You have mentioned appreciating the conversation around comfort in wearable technology. How do you approach integrating comfort into the assistive technologies you’re working on in the lab?

A: Designing for comfort has been a great lesson for me, especially over the last five years. I’ve spent my entire professional career as an engineer and a scientist. As engineers, we’re drawn to the technical side of design. We love technical requirements. We love going deep on biomechanical engineering. And sometimes we’re overly drawn to buzzwords like robotics and AI. But as someone who is developing a technology that is meant to be worn, and as someone who wants that technology not just to be tested in a laboratory but actually to be used daily by people, I’ve gained a deep appreciation for the importance of comfort and user experience. In fact, none of the technical capabilities matter with wearable tech if a person isn’t willing to wear the thing that you’ve designed.

I have a much deeper and more nuanced appreciation for comfort now than I did 10 years ago, certainly more than I did as a graduate student or postdoc or early professor. The approach that we take now when we’re designing things is to spend a lot more time on the front end with end users early in the design process to really understand their needs. And then we apply a user-centric, iterative design process that requires us to build both technical requirements and what we call user stories, or sometimes personas. This forces us to design solutions that are both effective and practical.

One common mistake in the assistive technology field—that I’ve seen widely in academia and also in the commercialization sector:—is overly focusing on optimizing effectiveness but not simultaneously designing for practicalities. Those practicalities are exemplified by questions like: Is the device comfortable? Physically, thermally, and psychosocially? Does it get in the way or interfere with movement? Is it going to be accessible and affordable to your intended end user? Will it fit people of different body shapes and sizes? These are such critical questions, and the mistake developers often make is not having those front-of-mind and included in the early iterative design process. It’s not something you can just tack on later. I think there are more people now embracing the importance of comfort and practicality but the field of assistive technology still has a ways to go in fully embracing that.

Engineering professor Karl Zelik at Vanderbilt University lab — *Engineering professor Karl Zelik in his lab at the Vanderbilt University Engineering Science Building. Photo courtesy of Karl Zelik.* *Photo by* *John Russell, Vanderbilt University.*

Q: Could you tell us about a project that you are working on now?

A: For the first five years as a professor at Vanderbilt, our lab was largely focused on lower limb prosthetics. Then, for the next five years, we were focused on these occupational exosuits, which led to spinning out HeroWear. We did a lot of the underlying research and developed a lot of the patented technologies underlying the exosuit, but then that project moved out into the real world and it became a separate business and an area of growth independent of the academic research.

In the last year or so, we’ve shifted our focus to remote patient monitoring as part of a 5-year project funded by the National Institutes of Health. Our goal is to use wearable sensor technologies to monitor patients after they’ve had surgery, to try to understand how to ensure that they quickly and fully recover. We’re using sensors that are embedded in shoes—with custom algorithms that we develop using biomechanics and machine learning—to non-invasively monitor musculoskeletal loading. We’re using this new sensor capability to look at individuals after they’ve had a specific type of lower-limb bone fracture surgery to better understand their healing and recovery process and try to elevate the standard of care. We hope to impact the long-term health outcomes of these patients, which unfortunately aren’t great for this population. This work is ongoing.

What’s exciting is that we’ve come up with a unique new way of monitoring the force that’s experienced on a person’s shank bone, the tibia bone, which is practical and effective to use outside the research lab and in daily life. We are now exploring how to use this new capability with patients who have had to undergo surgery to repair a badly fractured tibia bone. As they are recovering, we have algorithms that can—without implanting anything in their body—estimate how much force they’re putting on their bone. The loading of the bone plays a key role in stimulating tissue recovery and it helps the bone heal itself after the surgery. Monitoring bone loading in daily life may serve as a sort of biomarker to understand if patients are on the path to recovery or if we may need to alert their clinician that they need to change their rehab exercises or perform more physical activity to better stimulate biological healing processes.

Q: Where do you get your inspiration for new research?

A: When I was a graduate student, all of my research inspiration—the specific projects I was working on, the specific questions I was trying to answer—came from the academic community, from reading the scientific literature, from attending scientific conferences and understanding the gaps in the field. At the time, when I was a trainee, I also worked with a professor, who helped to set the research agenda and the priorities.

As I have gotten later into my career, where I source research ideas has really shifted. Now, probably only a third of what I work on are problems directly out of the scientific literature or derived from academic researchers in the field.

I’d say another third of my research ideas come from spending a lot more time with assistive technology end users and others outside of academia. That might be clinical patients, it might be medical doctors, it might be safety professionals, or it might be workers in different environments. So I am now drawing a lot more from industry and clinical perspectives, and from end user perspectives.

Then the last third of research ideas is honestly just from my daily life. Biomechanics is everywhere and there are opportunities all around for assistive technology to positively impact our lives. An example is the origins of the back exosuit. I wasn’t originally thinking about the massive problem of back pain and injury in physical jobs like warehousing and manufacturing, although perhaps I should have been. I got interested in back exosuits because I was a parent to young children and, like many parents, I was experiencing some back pain. I started thinking, Is there a way to develop a wearable device that would fit into my daily life and also provide me with back relief? The back exoskeletons that existed at the time were all too heavy, bulky, cumbersome, and costly to fit into my life. It got me thinking about how to keep the biomechanical effectiveness of these devices, but make them more practical, form-fitting, and comfortable. Soft, elastic back exosuits turned out to be a remarkably elegant and effective solution—if you can get the details right, which is where we focused a lot of our research and development efforts for several years.

Q: You are incredibly prolific; researching and writing, teaching, working in industry, and maintaining a significant social media presence. What strategies do you find useful for playing so many roles, keeping so many balls in the air? Please tell us your secret!

A: I mean, I think my secret is that I probably don’t do this juggling act as well as I should. I drop balls all the time. I’m lucky to work with amazing teams and people who are patient and forgiving. I’m lucky to live with an amazing family who is patient and forgiving when I don’t get the balance right. Throughout my career it’s been a continuous area of improvement, and I don’t feel like I have it figured out. I’m actively trying to find ways to be able to focus on a smaller number of priorities. Unfortunately, in academia, we have a tendency to spread ourselves too thin.

Q: You are known for translating tech out of the lab, and you do a great job of making technical information accessible for students and non-experts. What are some strategies you use to do that translating?

A: As researchers, we spend a lot of time going really deep in our fields and trying to help generate new knowledge. Part of our responsibility is figuring out, How do we communicate this information to stakeholders? How do we share this information with different groups?

I’ve come to appreciate that science communication to broad audiences is an important component of my job as a professor and, like any other component, we have to practice it. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to explain and simplify difficult concepts and trying to understand who the audience is, and what they may or may not need. I’m not always successful, in fact, I’ve probably come up with a lot of terrible analogies! But science communication has been a priority for me, and I’ve practiced it like any other skill. I’ve gotten better at understanding different audiences. What motivates them? What interests them? What causes their eyes to light up or for them to ask follow-on questions? How can I take technical content and pull out the key part that they need to know? Often it’s the 80/20 rule. What gets them most of the way there in understanding the concept without me geeking out on every little detail or boring them to sleep.

Every time I present, I’m tailoring the content to a specific audience. I’ve been fortunate over time to present to almost every conceivable audience, from very young children to high school age children to college students to experts in our scientific field to safety leaders to government officials to military leaders to boards of large organizations. And each person, whether you’re talking to somebody in safety or to someone who’s an operations or to someone in finance or to someone who’s aspiring to be a scientist, is interested in different aspects of a topic.

Exoskeleton are a great example because they’re such a fun, engaging topic, everyone is interested. I’ve even spent time with Hollywood producers and talked about these types of topics. I think the more time you get to spend with diverse groups of people talking about a similar topic, the better you get at explaining things. It’s natural now for me to be able to tailor the content, the message, and how technical or detailed it needs to be for a certain group. I would attribute that to a lot of practice, probably a lot of failure, and experimenting with different descriptions and analogies. Being in the field for 17 years I’ve talked to a lot of different people about biomechanics and assistive technology.

One of our objectives at the university is also to do science and engineering outreach. We bring students from kindergarten through 12th grade into the lab and show them some of the research and technology we use. We do everything from maker fairs to lab tours to having a big outreach event every year where we have an open house and invite anybody to come and check out the prosthetics and exoskeletons in the motion analysis lab. Sometimes we go out to local schools in the community and do outreach events. A lot of our outreach is about trying to share some of the cool things that kids can do with math and science, planting that seed. These have also been formative experiences for me, as well as other members of our lab, to practice and hone our science communication skills.

Q: What’s in your future?

A: For the next couple of years, I’m excited to go deeper into this space of wearable sensors and remote patient monitoring that I described earlier, and to continue supporting HeroWear during a period of significant growth.

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