Julian Goldman

I am not a traditional industrial designer. In undergrad I studied history and philosophy of science with a focus in bio-tech and minored in fine arts sculpture. I went on to work as a commercial salmon fisherman in Alaska to finance my snowboarding and traveling habit and then moved home to Boulder, CO to launch an organic granola company with my mother - it is called Boulder Granola (of course) and we sold it just this past August. In 2013, while driving my old Toyota from Colorado to Nicaragua and back, I decided it was time to make some career moves and at first began taking courses in math and physics in preparation for an engineering masters. Feeling a hole in my heart where my passion in art and craft was missing, I was luckily inspired by a product called the BioLite stove (and the company strategy it represents) to begin in an industrial design direction.

I enrolled in the Pratt Masters ID program, and attended the Global Innovation Design abroad program which took me to Keio Media Design in Tokyo, and the Royal College of Art in London. Through my experience at Pratt, Keio, and RCA, I picked up quite a few skills: CAD (mostly Solidworks and mesh modeling in Maya, Rhino, Zbrush - often to support 3D scanning - among others), I am okay at sketching in 2D but very good at sketching 3D. I also had the opportunity to learn in a variety of design genres from traditional ID, system design, and design thinking, to design strategy, speculative and critical design. I finalized my academic career eventually creating a thesis in a very speculative/critical vein outlining a future biometric data company focused on the monetization with secure privatization of personal information.

My design work has always focused in innovations in material and manufacturing and since graduating, I have been blessed to fall in to some very forward thinking research focused in textile specifically. At the Brooklyn Fashion and Design Accelerator I researched knitting technology as a computing platform and was part of producing 30 functional swatches and two prototype garments (Tek-Tiles project). In March of 2018, I showed a textile based interactive experiential art installation in AFA Gallery, SoHo called c o m p u t e r 1.0. My freelance projects are ongoing as well and have included speculative skin-worn biometric sensors designed with grasshopper, fishing bait attachments which are currently being optimized for injection molded manufacture, and light-up tutu’s for the Brooklyn Ballet’s Nutcracker.