From Rock Bottom, With an Ember Still Burning
A campaign to help me survive the present — and build what comes next.
I’m writing this from home, my live/work space, where I’ve spent most of the past year. On my desk: a coffee with milk going cold, and two of my three cats — Michaël and Leo — lounging behind my Apple display on top of my Mac. Mocha, a chocolate point Siamese who has always known exactly who she is, looks at me in her quiet upright posture like a statue, barely moving. A Kepler’s canvas tote full of books awaits: I keep meaning to get through them. It’s a small, quiet life right now — and inside it, something is still burning.
I have been a designer for 25+ years. Not as a job title — as a way of seeing. I graduated from Art Center College of Design, spent a decade at Apple helping build tools that changed how people create and share photos, videos, and music, and have since led design at companies across three continents. I have worked on things that reached billions of people. I have always believed that technology, in the right hands, can feel genuinely human.
That belief — that ember — was lit in 1992 and has never gone out. Not through the dot-com collapse. Not through every reinvention that followed. And not now, even as reality has become, for a while, very hard.
Where I am
In the coming days, I will begin my first round of chemo. I have no income. I have depleted my savings. I am doing this alone, from the same desk where I've always worked, with the same conviction that what I make still matters — and a new, humbling awareness of how much I need help to get through this.
I am not asking out of defeat. I am asking because the people worth knowing are not frightened by the truth, and because I have learned — slowly, the hard way — that vulnerability and strength are not opposites.
There is a glowing ember tucked inside a seashell. It has survived everything so far. I intend to keep it that way.
What this Campaign Covers
Your support goes directly toward basic living and medical expenses: treatment copays, medications, transportation to Stanford, and the everyday costs of staying alive while I cannot work on-site. Due to compromised immunity during treatment, I am not able to leave home easily — but I am writing, building, and documenting this journey honestly as it unfolds.
Alongside this campaign, I am building a personal website — a digital commonplace book — where I will publish that documentation: essays, visual work, and eventually digital goods and services. This campaign is the first chapter. What I build next depends on getting through this one.
What You Can Do
If this moves you, please donate — at any amount. Every contribution buys me time, and time is what I need most right now to get through treatment and build what comes next. If you can’t give right now, that’s completely okay. Sharing this with someone who might be moved by it matters just as much — sometimes more. The wider this reaches, the closer I get to the runway I need.
And if you — or someone in your network — needs strategic, hands-on design thinking for a digital product, platform, or early-stage venture, I'm available remotely and would love to connect. You’ll find me on LinkedIn at the link below.
If you want to follow where this goes, please check back for updates. I intend to make the journey worth your time. After all, making things that matter for other people — that's always been the whole point.
Thank you for being here. It means more than I know how to say.
⸻
Links
Videos
Organizer
