I have been curious about consumer products ever since early adolescence. Being an immigrant from an ex-soviet state, I was excluded from the frills of planned obsolescence. This led me to have an innate appreciation for reproducible quality, which manifested itself in soviet manufacturing, given its focus on minimal maintenance and maximum durability. Raised in a household of engineers, which fostered self-directed creativity, I reveled in making my own toys out of anything I could scavenge around the back alleys of the soviet block. Drawing came hand-in-hand with my affinity for building and tinkering with mechanisms. In high school, I studied fine art, which sensibly carried itself through to my imminent foray into architecture, culminating to my Bachelors in Architectural Science at the New York Institute of Technology in 2010. After the disillusionment of 2008 and the untimely collapse of the construction industry, I was eager to challenge the state of our consumer culture. My lengthy excursion to South East Asia, as well as an internship at a Brooklyn metal shop shortly after graduation, showed me how local manufacturing is becoming ever more sophisticated and sustainable, following the beat of the current craft movement. After a flurry of internships in design/build studios, I landed an internship at a retailer of bathroom and kitchen accessories, in which I was tasked to generate new concepts for their upcoming product line of dish drying racks. In response to the moral fulfillment of that experience, I was driven to expand my scholastic scope into product design. The following year, I enrolled in the Masters of Product Design program at the Domus Academy in Milan. Despite my diverse scope of interests, my main goal remains to take part in reproducing physical quality and to instill a sustainable cradle-to-cradle life-cycle approach to the global conscience of manufacturing.