About

About Excesspool

Excesspool is a personal digital portfolio, research archive, and creative playground documenting my hands-on experiments across physical computing, design systems, and digital art.

It serves as a curated catalog of my creative design work, traditional physical sculptures, and open-source software libraries, shared purely as a resource for the maker and design communities.

The Philosophy: Armatures and Clay

As a sculptor (BFA in Sculpture) and an experience designer, my personal work is guided by the relationship between structure and expression:

  • The Armature: In sculpture, you build a rigid, invisible wire frame to support the piece. In software and physical computing, I build structured, non-commercial open-source frameworks (like Ramme) to act as the "armature"—handling database schemas, AI agent instructions, and data-buffering under the hood.

  • The Clay: Because the structural armature is secure, I can spend my core creative energy modeling the "clay"—designing beautiful, tactile visual transitions, crafting intuitive motion, and building responsive physical-digital interfaces.

Featured Personal Experiments

This site acts as a repository for my ongoing, non-commercial creative projects:

  • Ramme: A free, open-source software project designed to explore how AI coding assistants can build real-time, hardware-connected web interfaces smoothly, without visual lag or layout stutter (ramme.io).

  • Bodewell: A personal, DIY plant-monitoring experiment showing how continuous soil-moisture sensor streams can be converted into conversational, natural-language updates (bodewell.io).

  • Vintage Instrument Retrofits: My active, tactile prototyping series. I take historically rich, 100-year-old analog testing instruments—like vintage Weston and Tessin meters—and retrofit them with round digital displays and local microcontrollers (ESP32) to explore responsive, conversational eye animations.

All of the 3D-printing CAD files, C++ microcontroller firmware, and React starter templates for these experiments are published on this storefront as free digital products to give back, share lessons learned, and support other hobbyists in the global maker community.