orchard
the orchard •
an analogy for my professional experience •
the orchard • an analogy for my professional experience •
• an analogy for my professional work experience •
I think of my work experience as an orchard that I’ve carefully planted and tended for many years. Each harvest comes with a sense of fulfillment and gratitude. This season I’m harvesting a few unique skills & passions that flavor my current offerings — crafted over two decades of architecture, leadership, art, technology, teaching & mentoring.
the harvest
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Complexity busting is the skill behind my passion for diagramming — this name comes from the Superpowers card deck by SY Partners. I can extract the essence of a complex topic or system in a way that allows me to both understand and communicate it. In my areas of expertise, I’m comfortable and functional across the full spectrum of complexity: from a visionary conceptual level to a highly detailed technical level.
This skill (plus empathy!) helps me also present information to others; I can break content down to an appropriate and relevant level for the audience. As a primarily visual thinker myself, I often use graphics to help communicate.
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branches & leaves
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interviewing
onboarding
initial training
ongoing professional development
job descriptions
evaluation criteria
employee reviews
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fruits
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roots
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trunk
my professional journey
I always loved art and design, especially furniture and shoe design, and had my heart set on going to a design school. Oh, I did a quick side quest into archaeology in high school. I ended up with two undergraduate degrees — Industrial Design and Art & Design.
Given health issues and a poor economy after graduation, I worked for a couple years designing interfaces and writing help documentation for software. In that time I also did a lot of woodworking. This work seemed like a slight detour, but these experiences had a big impact … designing and building furniture got me excited about designing the spaces that furniture goes in (architecture); creating interfaces led me to building websites as a side gig; and writing help docs increased my understanding of user experience and methods for software training.
I returned to grad school for Architecture, and was a class TA a few semesters. From there followed a traditional path for a while — internships, entry level positions, licensure, and steadily moving up the professional ladder to become a Project Architect.
When I joined KAA Design in 2011, they were just switching to Archicad and I agreed to spend half of my time teaching it to the office. Although I was adamant that I wanted to focus on architecture after this initial training period, the dual role stuck because of my genuine interests in both. Eventually, I worked with the partners to establish a new role, Director of Design Technology, in order to dedicate more time to this vision and effort.