I actually wanted to go to art school for undergrad, but because very few Canadian art schools offered bachelor's degrees at the time – and US schools were very expensive, I went to study physics which was my second choice.
During my studies, I started taking on design work: from designing posters/flyers for parties, illustrations for magazines and newspapers, and making 'digital art.'
In my final year at UofT, while my friends were applying to grad school for physics, I decided to finally go to art school and only applied to Yale.
After Yale I worked in NYC for a couple years. As you can imagine, working as a designer in NYC was pretty tough, but was also extremely valuable life-experience. In NYC I had a mutual friend who introduced me to John Maeda, and as a fan of his work we chatted a bit. He suggested I join his group at the Media Lab, so that's how I got to MIT.
I've always been more interested in research work and although for the past several years I focused on commercial work, I can't say any of them were particular favorites. I consider all the projects I worked on at MIT as my favorites. Our group's focus was on enabling creative collaboration on the web. From novel authentication systems using OpenID to Python enabled 3D graphics environments, it let me push my technical skills while making the work relevant to design and creativity.
As a dad I've been spending less time on personal projects and more time outside work on spending time with my daughter. But I still have occasions where I do all nighters working on something fun. I spend most of my day working on web-based work, I've been focusing on more Cocoa/iOS work. Last year I built a baby cam app using a cheap RTSP camera, and right now I'm making a personalized hiking app (since living in Silicon Valley we go hiking every weekend.)
Growing up I fell in love with computers, specifically as a tool to create visual things. I learn about John Maeda's work in the late 90s and it made me realize I'm not defined by pre-existing graphics applications and I can code to make visual things. Graphic design (not necessarily graphic designers) has always used contemporary technology to solve design problems, so I don't see this as anything unique.
It's a little cliche, but I consider myself a problem solver. Solve the problem with a little design, and a shit ton of code!
So many things. But I would start by creating a super fast, zero-downtime wifi network that will work anywhere in the world.
Of course! Having an open forum on the web is like a bathroom wall.