I’ve spent about 20 years working in the world of business and big tech. I’ve put my heart and soul into projects for insurance companies, corporate consulting, manufacturing, healthcare and utilities. I’ve enthusiastically approached these problems because I believed that as a designer, I could bring good to the world I was in by bringing creativity and thoughtfulness to a problem that likely hadn’t benefited from that yet.
But now it has become time for a new iteration. In my 20+ years of working for others as a designer, I can’t bring to mind a project that stands out in my mind that strongly that I would say that the time was extraordinarily well spent, save one: a bathroom remodel that I did during the pandemic.
During this project, I found myself face to face with so many opportunities to grow. I found the design process to be much more relevant than the one we followed at work, I experimented, I iterated, I evaluated, and I revised all aspects of this bathroom until I found myself with the perfect final one.
The before and after are stark and from all the work I’ve ever done, I can’t say that I’ve ever gotten more validation from a project I have worked on. This work was tangible, it wasn’t a file on a hard drive that might get lost or accidentally erased. And now in the dawn of the AI revolution, I find myself really craving this kind of tangible work, something I can put my hands on, and see and interact with, with my body and my eyes, in a lasting and ongoing way.
So when I got laid off in the spring of 2023, I decided to dedicate my life to this kind of work, and these kinds of challenges. Tangible, built environments. Contributing to a sense of home, the kind of design work that everyone can relate to.
As a result, Scavenger has been reinvented as a design-build renovation company and will endeavor to provide more women with the same experience that I had learning and building my own bathroom. Coaching and life transformation are ready outputs of a renovation effort, especially when one engages with the materials themselves. We hope to bring joy and empowerment to the world we work with, in this newest iteration.