My soft goods research bridges the gap between
industrial design and textiles & apparel design.
My scholarship is tied closely to RIT Soft Studio coursework and promotes the exploration, documentation, and dissemination of soft product design research. Working closely with both undergraduate and graduate industrial design students, my areas of interest include soft goods pedagogy and sustainability in textiles & product design.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine hosted a virtual public workshop to examine opportunities to increase the use of reusable health care textiles (HCTs) for personal protective equipment (PPE) used in health care settings. This workshop provided the opportunity for technical experts, policy makers, manufacturers, PPE users, and others to explore the potential benefits and feasibility of integrating more reusable HCTs into health care operations. I served as a Workshop Planning Committee Member and as a Panelist for the Environment Impact section.
Proceedings and an interactive overview are available on the NASEM website.
The Abracito Collection is centered around one of seven multidisciplinary projects supporting the RIT Hope for Honduras initiative. Industrial design students in my Senior ID Soft Studio course developed concepts for cloth wraps to improve the skin-to-skin care practice for NICU newborns at Hospitál Escuela in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.
In May 2018, I co-curated the exhibit ‘Soft Studio at NYCxDesign’ which showcased student work at WantedDesign Brooklyn during NYC Design Week. This exposed RIT Soft Studio work to more than 2,000 NY-based and international journalists and VIPs on Opening Night and over 15,000 attendees over the course of 6 days.
RIT Soft Studio’s Abracemos lo Nuestro documents, explores, and encourages traditional textile production in Paraguay in partnership with the Instituto Paraguayo de la Artesanía in Asunción, Paraguay.
