Personal Arc · May 2026 · Los Angeles
The tools change, the work doesn't. A throughline from a Macintosh Classic II at DASH to an interactive projection wall in 2026.
I learned design on a Macintosh Classic II in Miami in 1991. I didn't know I was learning design. I thought I was making stuff in HyperCard.
For people who weren't there: HyperCard came free on every Mac. It let you build interactive "stacks" of cards with buttons and links and small scripts. It was the first thing that let me click together an idea and have a screen do something. I built imaginary museums. I built a stack about my dog. I built a stack that quizzed my sister on multiplication tables.
I was eight, maybe nine. I had no idea any of it was a career.
Years later (DASH for high school, SCAD for college, Atlanta for the agency years, Twitter, OVG, now LA and Beautiful Engine), I keep coming back to the same thing. The tools change. The wonder doesn't.
The thing I loved about HyperCard at nine is the thing I love about TouchDesigner at forty-something: a screen that responds. A program that lets you sketch in motion. The feeling of *click → it does something* is still the feeling that makes me design.
What's changed is the resolution of the screens, the speed of the loop, the ambition of what you can attempt. What hasn't changed is the kid who thought making the computer respond to a click was the most magical thing in the world.
This is what we forget at our peril. The technical sophistication of a 4K projection wall driven by gesture tracking is, mechanically, the descendant of an 8-year-old clicking a button on a 9-inch black-and-white screen. Same wonder, different scaffolding.
Right now I'm building an interactive projection wall in TouchDesigner where the visuals respond to people dancing in front of it. The first time I got it working (figure recognized, particle field reacting), I felt nine years old again.
If you've been doing this long enough, you know this feeling. If you haven't, it's worth chasing.