How Art and Design Taught Me to Build What Didn’t Exist

When I left high school—graduating in the top ten of my class—I wasn’t ready to go straight into college. I didn’t know what I wanted, and I wasn’t convinced that jumping immediately into more schooling would help me figure it out. So I worked in a restaurant, saved a little money, and tried to understand who I was supposed to become.

Eventually, I found a small liberal arts college on the other side of the country. It was far too expensive for me, and I took on debt I am still paying off, but it changed my life. Not because of prestige or networking—because it taught me how to think with my hands. It taught me that materials have personalities. That form and function are intertwined. That problem-solving is a creative act.

Those years opened something in me I didn’t know was there. I learned to experiment, to fail, to try again, and to see possibilities instead of limits. I learned to approach every object—every material—not for its intended purpose but for its potential.

So I kept going. I went on to art school (which was also too expensive, so yes, I took out even more debt). But the return on that investment wasn’t financial; it was skill, discipline, and the ability to imagine and build things that do not yet exist. I learned to evaluate materials based on durability, flexibility, aesthetics, and behavior. I learned how to push something past the role it was designed for and make it do something entirely new.

And all the while, my body was quietly teaching me a second curriculum.

As a teenager, I had chronic joint pain and fatigue that I didn’t yet have names for. I moved through the world with a body that needed accommodations I didn’t know how to articulate. I organized my days around pain levels and energy dips, years and years before any doctor ever said the words “diagnosis.” Those conditions turned out to be real—several, actually—but long before I knew their names, I was already building the coping strategies that would protect me two decades later.

In a way, art school and disability taught me the same lesson:
Work with what you have. Adapt when things don’t fit. Build solutions where none exist.

So when I became a wheelchair user, all of this—the creative problem-solving, the material experimentation, the improvisational resilience—came with me.
When airlines began damaging my wheelchair, sometimes badly, the artistic instinct kicked in first:
What materials are strong but lightweight?
How could panels connect without stressing the frame?
What can bend without breaking?
What can protect without adding bulk?

And then the disability instinct kicked in right behind it:
What will reduce my pain?
What will minimize strain?
How can this adapt to different chairs, widths, lengths?
What will keep someone else’s independence intact?

Aegis Armor started as sketches, then cardboard prototypes, then Coroplast cutouts taped together on my living room floor. I moved on to flexible plastics, then rigid plastics, then the automotive-grade ABS used in car dashboards. I tested hinges from every corner of the design universe: scoring sheets like a folding screen, upholstery webbing, elastic straps, and eventually a marine-grade bungee cord system with metal end caps that let users add or remove panels depending on their chair’s size.

I built a dozen versions. Probably more. And each one taught me something new about strength, flexibility, and how to design with and for the reality of mobility devices.

The hinge system I finally landed on doesn’t just make the Frame Fender adaptable—it makes it repairable. Sustainable. Modular. Replaceable if a single panel ever gets damaged. It’s built the way disabled people have to live: ready to pivot, ready to adjust, ready to hold firm but not break under pressure.

That’s art.
That’s design.
And that’s disability culture.

Aegis Armor is the first time all these parts of my life have converged into something I can hold in my hands—a product born from the intersection of problem-solving, experimentation, aesthetic judgment, and lived experience.
I didn’t set out to become an entrepreneur. I set out to protect my wheelchair. To protect my independence. To protect the ability to travel without fear.

But what I learned in those early classrooms, and studios, and makeshift home workshops is that creative work becomes most powerful when it serves a need. When it solves a problem that should never have existed in the first place.

I am an artist.
I am a designer.

And I have always been someone who adapts to environments that weren’t built for me.
Aegis Armor is all of that, wrapped into one.