Carpentry, Event & Tradeshow Design
An Intro to Building
Before there were sitemaps and wireframes, there were walls.
Before experience architecture, there was physical construction—framing, joinery, fabrication, and the hard problem of designing environments that perform without you standing inside them managing every variable.
This page documents three parallel practices that ran alongside my digital work for decades and quietly shaped it all. The constraint that governs agentic AI instruction today—design it so it holds without you, because you can't be everywhere at once—was first learned with a hammer, a burned screen, and a haunted house running on opening night.
“Design it so it holds without you, because you can’t be everywhere at once.”
Carpentry, House Construction & Woodworking
Carpentry came early and ran deep in my formative years, through construction, fabrication, set-building, and the kind of hands-on problem-solving that teaches you what no drawing can: that materials have opinions, tolerances are real, and an underspecified joint fails exactly when you need it to hold.
This practice wove through nearly every other track—event builds, tradeshow structures, residential construction, and custom fabrication. It left behind a specific kind of clarity: physical making teaches specification discipline in a way that digital work often doesn't. You can't iterate a load-bearing wall. You either got the spec right before you built it, or you started over.
Tradeshow Booth Design & Build
A tradeshow booth is a compressed experience problem: you have seconds to orient a stranger, a fixed footprint, and no control over who walks in or in what order. The design has to do all the work.
Tradeshow work demanded the same discipline as every other environment I built—but with harder constraints on time, budget, and assembly. Booths ship flat and have to become something coherent on a convention floor in hours, assembled by people who weren't in the design meeting. That's not just fabrication. That's systems design with a hard deadline and a stranger as the executor.
The work spanned concept through build, spatial planning, material selection, graphic integration, structural fabrication, and the logic of how a visitor moves through and exits with the right idea about who you are.
Event & Stage Design & Build
The largest environments I've ever designed weren't digital. They were physical, live, and running in real time with thousands of people moving through them in any given event.
The work here runs from intimate to institutional—from guided full-moon canoe trips on the Schuylkill River to the full haunted attraction environment at Eastern State Penitentiary, one of the most storied correctional institutions in American history, and later at Fort Mifflin. From early Do Lab productions to Coachella installations to Lightning in a Bottle environments designed to hold for the duration of a multi-day festival.
The through-line across all of it: you design the experience so it holds. You train the people inside it so they can execute without you narrating every step. Then you let it run and watch what breaks. What breaks is always the underspecified part.
“You design the experience so it holds.”
That diagnostic, identifying the failure category before it happened, was cleanly transferred from every physical environment I built into every digital system that followed. The instruction set for an AI agent and the operations brief for a crew running Eastern State on closing night are solving the same problem at different scales.
Named work
Terror Behind the Walls — Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia, PA
Fort Mifflin haunted attraction, Philadelphia, PA
Valley Forge Outdoors — guided river trips, eco-tours, and more all along the Schuylkill River, including the inaugural first two years of the Schuylkill River Sojourn (an annual 6-7 day paddling trip of the entire river, from source to mouth).
The Do Lab — Coachella, Lightning in a Bottle, Burning Man installations
And assorted other projects