More projects

Personal projects, coursework, and other recent design-related activities

custom Brass intrument parts

My workbench during the fabrication of a new design of tuning slide for my Yamaha Chicago Generation 3 prototype C trumpet. This tuning slide, along with other similar parts, was made as a personal project resulting from my research grant awarded through the departments of cognitive science and physics for auditory scene analysis. I had the pleasure of observing and participating in preliminary design of the trumpet shown along with the Yamaha brass design team in 2016.

iron and bronze castings

As a part of the spring 2018 course Da Vinci: Art, Geometry, and Manufacturing, a course on the evolution of making and manufacturing throughout history along with the art and geometry studies of Leonardo Da Vinci, I participated in a student-run iron pour. I designed a 3D tessellating tea set based on truncated octahedra cast in molds printed in collaboration with VoxelJet.

accessible sinks for Shedd Aquarium

For my Design Thinking and Communication I class, I was a part of a team tasked with redesining the stingray touch exhibit at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. Improvements focused on accessibility, child friendliness, visual communication, and immersive experience. The project was selected from a pool of 20 competitors for permanent implementation at the aquarium.

Product Tear-downs

Some of my most vivid memories as a young child come from disassembling my family’s out of commission printers. In college this has evolved into the practice of carefully tearing down products and CAD modeling their components as research for product design projects. This photo is from a handheld vacuum teardown for Design for Manufacture, taken Spring of 2018.

Lossless Stone Carving and Casting

This project was completed for Michael Rakowitz's Introduction to Sculpture course at Northwestern University. All casts and carvings are at least 85% by weight cutoff from the original ten pound block of alabaster. Casts were made from composites of alabaster powder and dimethylsiloxate or acrylic plaster resin. More than 93% of the original stone was preserved in the final form.

Hockey skate Materials selection and design

This collaboration with Jake Hullings and Michael Pitorak studied the history, evolution, manufacture, and materials selection of professional American hockey skate blades. Base on the findings, we proposed a redesign using new geometries and alloys.

pastry molds

In collaboration with my sister, pastry chef Maddie Brehm, I designed and fabricated silicone molds for mousse cakes. The design process required on-the-fly learning about the needs dictated by the workflow and materials of the professional chef. I used an Ultimaker 3D printer to fabricate multi-part molds with which to build final silicone molds for mousse cakes.