The gardener.

Roots

I learned to think in systems by watching them fail. I grew up in Zimbabwe while its economy came apart. Money, fuel, schools, power, one by one.

What stayed with me isn't the collapse. It's what people grew in its place: neighbours pooling what they had, informal networks quietly doing what institutions no longer could, my parents holding steady through all of it. Ubuntu, I am because we are, was never a phrase to me; it was how everyone around me operated. Those improvised systems ran on empathy, and they worked because people understood what the person next to them actually needed.

That's where I learned to look underneath things, and why I design with people, not just for them. The best rooms I've worked in all had one thing in common: the quietest person got heard at some point. The worst outcomes had one thing in common too.

Craft

Growing up in Zimbabwe, I was mostly watching. My own test came later, when I had to pay my way through a Bachelor of Interaction Design in Toronto.

I stretched $500 over months, worked restaurant shifts until 10, and took freelance clients until 2am, all to cover the tens of thousands the degree cost. I graduated with honors and a nearly perfect GPA, but the numbers aren't the point. That stretch taught me that craft isn't something you apply when conditions are perfect. It's what you hold onto when they aren't. And a working system, even a scrappy one, is what buys you the room to do careful work. A tight brief and a hard deadline still produce some of my best.

I didn't make it through alone, either. It took building a small community of teachers, friends, strangers, and the college itself, the way I'd watched it done back home. And I found purpose in giving back, mentoring students and working as a teaching assistant, all of it unpaid, believing that what you learn is best shared. It was the first system I built that compounded for the people around me.

The work

All of it adds up to a simple thesis: good work compounds.

The most valuable things I've made usually aren't screens. A service blueprint that helped teams understand and simplify years of inefficiency, taking an ordering process from four months to two days. A design system that accelerated development enough to help keep a company afloat. A product vision that brought strategy to life and inspired a global community to keep building on it. And more than once, the realization that something shouldn't ship at all.

I design the systems around the product as much as the product itself, because that's the order it compounds in: the team gets faster first, then the customer. Plant the right things, tend them, prune what doesn't belong, and the harvest keeps coming long after you've moved on. That's the garden this site is named for.

The rest

Giving back

Mentoring designers at no cost, and writing in the open through this site's garden

Off the clock

Photography walks, tennis, 3D printing, board games, and ongoing negotiations with my dog, Oreo

Serious about

Finding the best pizza in town, and daydreaming