My job is the thinking before the doing.

A county government holding 2.7 million square feet of real estate, a portfolio valued above $2.3 billion, and a twenty-year question: what should all of it become? By the time I joined, the team had done the gathering: surveys, quantitative studies, interviews across departments. What they did not have was a way to make the data mean something.

My partner and I worked together to build the bridge from information to decision. The data became principles. The principles became decision-making filters. The filters became a weighted scale for prioritizing change, so every building in the portfolio could be scored and sorted into a category: renovate, consolidate, build new. The same weighted scale then sequenced the implementation plan, and the implementation plan forecast the budget. One logic, carried from raw survey data to a defensible twenty-year number.

The plan was adopted in 2024 and now guides two decades of investment, consolidation, and use across the county's portfolio.

Noblis is a nonprofit in the government defense contracting space, and the structure is the story: every dollar of profit is reinvested in its people and its own proprietary research. That means Noblis can arrive with proof-of-concept work already underway for challenges the government has not yet defined. Unlike its larger competitors, it is people first by design. The question was how to make that differentiator something a customer could walk through and feel.

Visioning sessions and interviews with the leadership team answered it. Together we defined the experience strategy for a new customer engagement center: who it serves, what it must teach, where it should entertain, and how a research-forward, people-first identity becomes physical and interactive. The strategy set the brief for a center built to educate new customers and deepen existing relationships.

The center opens with Noblis's new headquarters in fall 2027, with the experience strategy guiding its design.

The American Royal has told the story of American agriculture for more than a century. Its new Learning and Engagement Center has to tell that story to the next one: twelve galleries covering global agriculture and the Royal's own history, with education goals every gallery had to meet. The interpretive question was the hard one: through whose eyes, and with what message?

The interpretive master plan answered it. With the Royal's CEO and subject matter experts, we determined the focus and primary message for each of the twelve galleries, telling the story through five lenses: the farmer, the rancher, global economics, sustainability, and innovation. The plan set the content framework against the center's education goals, so every gallery knows what it teaches and why it earns its square footage.

The finished plan is now the design team's brief, with each gallery's primary message serving as the inspiration for its design. The center opens in 2027.

The pursuit began a year before the RFP existed, in Gensler's prepositioning work: cultivating the client relationship and helping UCAR/NCAR understand the challenge it was actually trying to solve. When the RFQ arrived, it came with federal procurement requirements, a three-stage RFQ, RFP, and interview process, and a scope that demanded at least eight practice areas, reached across five Gensler offices.

For nine months the response ran through one desk: meetings managed across five offices, assets gathered, content reviewed, and the strategy set for every deliverable from qualifications through the final interview.

The message strategy centered on the human side. The post-pandemic cultural shift UCAR was navigating was what drove the real estate change: a smaller footprint, optimized space, and buildings renovated for sustainability. We led with the people and let the square footage follow.

We finished second. UCAR selected an engineering-led team whose case centered the technical scope; ours centered the culture doing the changing. We would make the same bet again.

This was a Covid-era project. The site was an act of adaptive reuse: the former small mammal enclosure at the Zoo's entry, whose depth and shape turned out to be right for a penguin pool and holding building.

The thinking came before the contracting. The Zoo's staff designer created conceptual drawings, and an internal rough-order-of-magnitude budget exercise against them earned Board approval before a single outside contract was signed. The team then hired Perry Becker Design and Vertix to design and build, worked with the bird team to define the habitat's requirements, created the visitor engagement interactives, and worked with the interpretation team to tell the conservation story of a critically endangered species.

Pinnacol African Penguin Point opened in 2021, on time and under budget through the era's supply chain delays. It was the Zoo's first capital project out of the pandemic and the first to begin the ZIP's construction sequencing, carrying new campus pathways and lighting with it.

An empty gallery costs a science center every day it sits dark. GameXploration existed to fill one, and the schedule followed: six months from concept to installation, 7,500 square feet, on a $500K budget.

We prototyped heavily and early, testing interactives with real visitors to make sure nothing we designed was too difficult for the public to maneuver. The exhibition was built for a teen audience, so we went a step further and engaged a teen audience group to staff the gallery itself: the people the exhibition was for became the people running it. Community partners rounded out the content and the reach.

GameXploration opened in 2018, six months after concept began, with the exhibition team and design consultants delivering every phase in between.

The Apollo 11 command module was coming to St. Louis on the Smithsonian's schedule, not ours. Waiting for it was a companion exhibition that had been funded and then stalled: the project nobody could get moving, with a deadline nobody could move.

The stall had a specific shape: no storyline, and no design team yet hired. Until the story existed, the education team could not build the gallery programming and public programming that had to surround the show, and there was no one to plan floors and flow. Everything downstream was waiting on a narrative. The unsticking ran on two tracks at once: the internal team started moving on the storyline while the design team was hired, so the moment the story landed, design could move.

From there it was the hub model as a lived experience rather than a diagram. The companion exhibit was one spoke: its team moving through design and fabrication while gallery and public programs came together in parallel, each on its own track, all landing at once. Coordination ran outward too: meetings with SITES, work with the show's other host venues, and supporting the Science Center's Vice President throughout.

Destination Moon opened on time, companion exhibition and programs with it. The Science Center's run drew 200,000 visitors in four months.

A hundred-year-old brand was moving into a new headquarters, and the spaces had a problem in waiting: reception, workplace, and an internal history exhibit could easily read as a set of disconnected rooms. The brief was continuity. One brand, one century, one story, told from the front desk to the workplace floor.

The work ran through Gensler's environmental graphic design studio. I worked the team through strategy, concept, and schematic design; from there the seat became coordination, keeping environmental graphic designers, mural artists, exhibit fabricators, and signage vendors aligned so the narrative never broke as it moved between mediums: painted wall to fabricated exhibit to wayfinding signage, each in a different maker's hands, all speaking in the same voice.

What opened was a headquarters anchored by a hand-painted mural, a custom wagon-bed light installation, and a century-of-history exhibit, landing as one cohesive brand experience for employees and visitors alike.