d.school d'Arbeloff Fellow 2008-2009 & Lecturer
Joel is above all, an amazingly bad speller. One day he wandered through the doors of the d.school to find what he considers the motherload of delusional creatives.
After a climatically advantageous childhood in Jamaica building potato canons and running around in circles on the athletic track, Joel took the international leap from Jamaica to a scholarship at MIT. Restless, curious, inspired, and somewhat disgruntled about the weather, Joel decided that heart of design was about having courage to try and change things. Inspiration came after a fellowship to a wheelchair design workshop in remote Mexico, when he first realized that he could apply his mechanical engineering skills to impact lives.
Through a philosophy of 1) figure out what you love to do, 2) then do it, Joel learned iteratively that what keeps him up at night are experiences that are human centered, tangible, and explosively innovative. Since his studies at MIT, Joel has tried an eclectic mix of industry experiences from ultrasonic surgical cutting tools, to designing Spiderman-style gecko adhesives in Singapore and, more recently was a product designer in Apple's digital hub product design group.
Taking the advice of David Kelley to gravitate towards the choice that "puts you most out of your comfort zone" Joel defected MIT to follow the westward migration to a master's degree in mechanical engineering at Stanford. At Stanford, Joel fell in love with redesigning experiences through a process that put the user in the center. With a 4 person design team, Joel recently redesigned the mobility experience for amputees in India by developing an extremely affordable prosthetic knee joint for less than $20.
Now, as a design fellow in the d.school, Joel is pushing the boundaries on making "real stuff", innovation through the intersection of collaboration, design and technology. He thinks he will get there with a community of people crazy enough to try to change the world.
Joel spends his procrastination time building absurd electro-mechanical contraptions, taking photographs, and avoiding cold weather.
