Susan is a design leader with many years of experience in the
California commercial design industry. Her most valued partnerships
are with clients who value knowledge sharing, and who look to design
to transform their organizations.
Across her career, Susan has drawn inspiration from humanist
architects, interior designers, and industrial designers from Eileen
Gray to Michael Graves and Laura Guido Clark. By learning from the
masters, Susan now applies her own set of design maxims, which
hinge on dimensionality, comfort, color theory, and balance. Drawing
from both industrial design and her father’s career as a Hanna
Barbera cartoonist, Susan often explores different mediums for
communicating ideas, from hand sketching to rapid 3D prototyping.
This pendulum of growth through learning has now swung in a new
direction: her mentorship of the next generation of design talent is
focused on confidence building for underrepresented groups.
Susan believes that in this digital age, design should be used
to plug people into networks of other people – to build human
connection. From a building’s approach to its most personal detail,
the environment is absorbed both emotionally and physically. Susan
thrives on finding harmony between these connections of scale,
place, and people.
